Definitely not 1984
PART ONE
Chapter 1
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a
coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall.
It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even
at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric
current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive
in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the
lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was
one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about
when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had
something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an
oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface
of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank
somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument
(the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of
shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face
naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in
the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere. The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding
corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER
IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into
Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner,
flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the
single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's
windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police
mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away
about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The
telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course
no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual
wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all
the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted
to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he
well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of
Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape.
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of
Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him
whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these
vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not
remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit
tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth--Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was the official
language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see
Appendix.]--was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It
was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring
up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston
stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in
elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above
ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London
there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So
completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof
of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They
were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus
of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself
with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of
Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which
maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible
for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv,
and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows
in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor
within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except
on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of
barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even
the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced
guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the
expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing
the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving
the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the
canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's
breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid
with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily
smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful,
nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The
stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the
sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The
next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world
began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet
marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the
tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful.
He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood
to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a
penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a
red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual
position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where
it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the
window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston
was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been
intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well
back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so
far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed
in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual
geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now
about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of
the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper,
a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for
at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much
older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little
junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not
now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire
to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops
('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not
strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and
razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He
had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside
and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious
of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home
in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising
possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal
(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected
it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least
by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into
the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic
instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one,
furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the
beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead
of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing
by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything
into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present
purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a
second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the
decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To
begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It
must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was
thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary?
For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the
doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the
Newspeak word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of what he had
undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It
was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present,
in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it,
and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had
changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed
not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have
forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks
past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed
his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing
would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable
restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for
years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover
his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it,
because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking
by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front
of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music,
and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what
he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and
down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its
full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good
one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean.
Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the
water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights,
then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as
suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with
laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a
helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been
a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in
her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her
breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting
her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright
herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought
her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20
kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood.
then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up
into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it
up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in
the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting
they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint
right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her
out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles
say typical prole reaction they never----
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did
not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious
thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had
clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to
writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident
that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could
be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston
worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them
in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the
middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken
to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often
passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she
worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably--since he had sometimes seen
her with oily hands and carrying a spanner--she had some mechanical job
on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of
about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic
movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the
very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the
atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general
clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked
nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always
the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted
adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and
nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression
of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor
she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into
him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even
crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That,
it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar
uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever
she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O'Brien, a member of the Inner Party and
holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim
idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people
round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member
approaching. O'Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse,
humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a
certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on
his nose which was curiously disarming--in some indefinable way, curiously
civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such
terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his
snuffbox. Winston had seen O'Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many
years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued
by the contrast between O'Brien's urbane manner and his prize-fighter's
physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief--or perhaps
not even a belief, merely a hope--that O'Brien's political orthodoxy was
not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again,
perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but
simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a
person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and
get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this
guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O'Brien glanced
at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently
decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was
over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away.
A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was
between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine
running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room.
It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the
back of one's neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had
flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the
audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and
disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading
figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and
then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned
to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes
of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in
which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor,
the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against
the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations,
sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was
occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of
Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a
sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack
upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that
a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible
enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less
level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big
Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding
the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom
of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought,
he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed--and all
this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the
habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak
words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally
use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army--row
after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam
up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others
exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the
background to Goldstein's bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable
exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.
The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power
of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides,
the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger
automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia
or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was
generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although
Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a
thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the
general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this,
his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes
waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs
acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police.
He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of
conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its
name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible
book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author
and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a
title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one knew
of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor
THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if
there was a way of avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little
sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and
shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed.
He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The
dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!'
and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the
screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued
inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the
others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The
horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to
act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining
in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous
ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of
people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into
a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an
abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to
another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian
of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he
was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein
seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and
the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister
enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure
of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one's hatred this way or that
by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one
wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired
girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind.
He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked
to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would
ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before,
moreover, he realized WHY it was that he hated her. He hated her because
she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with
her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which
seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious
scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual
sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep.
Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed
to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and
seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the
people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But
in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the
hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired,
black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that
it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying.
It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are
uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but
restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big
Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood
out in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the
screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone's eyeballs was
too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung
herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a
tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms
towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent
that she was uttering a prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow,
rhythmical chant of 'B-B!...B-B!'--over and over again, very slowly, with a
long pause between the first 'B' and the second--a heavy, murmurous sound,
somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the
stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as
thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in
moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom
and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis,
a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
Winston's entrails seemed to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could
not help sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chanting of
'B-B!...B-B!' always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the
rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to
control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive
reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the
expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was
exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened--if, indeed,
it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He had taken
off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with
his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when
their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew--yes, he
KNEW!--that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable
message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the
thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am
with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you
are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust.
But don't worry, I am on your side!' And then the flash of intelligence
was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such
incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him
the belief, or hope, that others besides himself were the enemies of the
Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true after
all--perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was impossible, in spite
of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the
Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days
not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything
or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory
walls--once, even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand
which had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all
guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything. He had gone back to his
cubicle without looking at O'Brien again. The idea of following up their
momentary contact hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably
dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it. For a second, two
seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of
the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in
which one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out a belch. The gin
was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly
musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was
no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid
voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals--
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the
writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial
act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the
spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he
wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made
no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go
on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the
same. He had committed--would still have committed, even if he had never
set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself.
Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be
concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for
years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night--the arrests invariably happened at night. The
sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights
glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast
majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People
simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the
registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your
one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished,
annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a
hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i
dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the
neck i dont care down with big brother----
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down
the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at
the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that whoever it was
might go away after a single attempt. But no, the knocking was repeated.
The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a
drum, but his face, from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got
up and moved heavily towards the door.
Chapter 2
As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that he had left the
diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it,
in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room. It was an
inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his
panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book
while the ink was wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly a warm wave of relief
flowed through him. A colourless, crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair
and a lined face, was standing outside.
'Oh, comrade,' she began in a dreary, whining sort of voice, 'I thought I
heard you come in. Do you think you could come across and have a look at
our kitchen sink? It's got blocked up and----'
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor. ('Mrs' was
a word somewhat discountenanced by the Party--you were supposed to call
everyone 'comrade'--but with some women one used it instinctively.) She was
a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had the impression
that there was dust in the creases of her face. Winston followed her down
the passage. These amateur repair jobs were an almost daily irritation.
Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were
falling to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls,
the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked whenever there was
snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not
closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you
could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which
were liable to hold up even the mending of a window-pane for two years.
'Of course it's only because Tom isn't home,' said Mrs Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons' flat was bigger than Winston's, and dingy in a different
way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the
place had just been visited by some large violent animal. Games
impedimenta--hockey-sticks, boxing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of
sweaty shorts turned inside out--lay all over the floor, and on the
table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books.
On the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the Spies, and
a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the usual boiled-cabbage
smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper
reek of sweat, which--one knew this at the first sniff, though it was
hard to say how--was the sweat of some person not present at the moment.
In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was
trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing
from the telescreen.
'It's the children,' said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive glance
at the door. 'They haven't been out today. And of course----'
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle. The kitchen
sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy greenish water which smelt
worse than ever of cabbage. Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint
of the pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down, which was
always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons looked on helplessly.
'Of course if Tom was home he'd put it right in a moment,' she said.
'He loves anything like that. He's ever so good with his hands, Tom is.'
Parsons was Winston's fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was
a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile
enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on
whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party
depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly evicted from the
Youth League, and before graduating into the Youth League he had managed to
stay on in the Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry
he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence was not
required, but on the other hand he was a leading figure on the Sports
Committee and all the other committees engaged in organizing community
hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary
activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride, between whiffs
of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance at the Community Centre every
evening for the past four years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of
unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about
wherever he went, and even remained behind him after he had gone.
'Have you got a spanner?' said Winston, fiddling with the nut on the
angle-joint.
'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate. 'I don't
know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children----'
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the comb as the
children charged into the living-room. Mrs Parsons brought the spanner.
Winston let out the water and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair
that had blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could in
the cold water from the tap and went back into the other room.
'Up with your hands!' yelled a savage voice.
A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table
and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister,
about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood.
Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red
neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands
above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's
demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.
'You're a traitor!' yelled the boy. 'You're a thought-criminal! You're a
Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporize you, I'll send you to the salt
mines!'
Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting 'Traitor!' and
'Thought-criminal!' the little girl imitating her brother in every
movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of
tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of
calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or
kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.
It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.
Mrs Parsons' eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back
again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest
that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.
'They do get so noisy,' she said. 'They're disappointed because they
couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is. I'm too busy to take
them. and Tom won't be back from work in time.'
'Why can't we go and see the hanging?' roared the boy in his huge voice.
'Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!' chanted the little
girl, still capering round.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to be hanged in the
Park that evening, Winston remembered. This happened about once a month,
and was a popular spectacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see
it. He took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he had not
gone six steps down the passage when something hit the back of his neck an
agonizingly painful blow. It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed
into him. He spun round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son
back into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
'Goldstein!' bellowed the boy as the door closed on him. But what most
struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman's greyish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen and sat down at the
table again, still rubbing his neck. The music from the telescreen had
stopped. Instead, a clipped military voice was reading out, with a sort of
brutal relish, a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of
terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night
and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were
horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as
the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages,
and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the
discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and
everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the
hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship
of Big Brother--it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their
ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against
foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal
for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with
good reason, for hardly a week passed in which 'The Times' did not carry
a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak--'child hero'
was the phrase generally used--had overheard some compromising remark
and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked up his pen
half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find something more to write
in the diary. Suddenly he began thinking of O'Brien again.
Years ago--how long was it? Seven years it must be--he had dreamed that he
was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of
him had said as he passed: 'We shall meet in the place where there is no
darkness.' It was said very quietly, almost casually--a statement, not a
command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the
time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him. It was
only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He
could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that
he had seen O'Brien for the first time, nor could he remember when he had
first identified the voice as O'Brien's. But at any rate the identification
existed. It was O'Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.
Winston had never been able to feel sure--even after this morning's flash
of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure whether O'Brien was a friend
or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. There was a link of
understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship.
'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' he had said.
Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it
would come true.
The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call, clear and beautiful,
floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly:
'Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived
from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious
victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may
well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the
newsflash----'
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty.
Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving a deflated feeling.
The telescreen--perhaps to celebrate the victory, perhaps to drown the
memory of the lost chocolate--crashed into 'Oceania, 'tis for thee'. You
were supposed to stand to attention. However, in his present position he
was invisible.
'Oceania, 'tis for thee' gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to
the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and
clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating
roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at
present.
Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the
word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles
of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as
though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a
monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past
was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single
human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the
dominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER? Like an answer, the three
slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny
clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of
the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you.
On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on
the wrappings of a cigarette packet--everywhere. Always the eyes watching
you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating,
indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed--no escape. Nothing was your
own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of the Ministry of Truth,
with the light no longer shining on them, looked grim as the loopholes of a
fortress. His heart quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too
strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs would not batter
it down. He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the
future, for the past--for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of
him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to
ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had
written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could
you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an
anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes. He had to be
back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so
long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken.
It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on
the human heritage. He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men
are different from one another and do not live alone--to a time when truth
exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of
Big Brother, from the age of doublethink--greetings!
He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now,
when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken
the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in the act
itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay
alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were inkstained.
It was exactly the kind of detail that might betray you. Some nosing zealot
in the Ministry (a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department) might start
wondering why he had been writing during the lunch interval, why he had
used an old-fashioned pen, WHAT he had been writing--and then drop a hint
in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom and carefully scrubbed
the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like
sandpaper and was therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless to think of
hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether or not its existence had
been discovered. A hair laid across the page-ends was too obvious. With the
tip of his finger he picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and
deposited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be shaken
off if the book was moved.
Chapter 3
Winston was dreaming of his mother.
He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had
disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow
movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered more vaguely
as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered
especially the very thin soles of his father's shoes) and wearing
spectacles. The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one
of the first great purges of the fifties.
At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him,
with his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all,
except as a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes.
Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean
place--the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave--but it
was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards.
They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the
darkening water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see
him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the
green waters which in another moment must hide them from sight for ever.
He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death,
and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew
it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach
either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they
must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of
the unavoidable order of things.
He could not remember what had happened, but he knew in his dream that in
some way the lives of his mother and his sister had been sacrificed to his
own. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic
dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which
one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable
after one is awake. The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his
mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in
a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the
ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship,
and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to
know the reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died
loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and
because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a
conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he
saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but
no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to
see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him
through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.
Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when
the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was
looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain
whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he
called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a
foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged
hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were
swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense
masses like women's hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight,
there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the
pools under the willow trees.
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With
what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them
disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire
in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant
was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside.
With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture,
a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the
Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid
movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time.
Winston woke up with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips.
The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle which continued on
the same note for thirty seconds. It was nought seven fifteen, getting-up
time for office workers. Winston wrenched his body out of bed--naked, for
a member of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons annually,
and a suit of pyjamas was 600--and seized a dingy singlet and a pair of
shorts that were lying across a chair. The Physical Jerks would begin in
three minutes. The next moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit
which nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied his lungs
so completely that he could only begin breathing again by lying on his back
and taking a series of deep gasps. His veins had swelled with the effort of
the cough, and the varicose ulcer had started itching.
'Thirty to forty group!' yapped a piercing female voice. 'Thirty to forty
group! Take your places, please. Thirties to forties!'
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the
image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and
gym-shoes, had already appeared.
'Arms bending and stretching!' she rapped out. 'Take your time by me. ONE,
two, three, four! ONE, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of
life into it! ONE, two, three four! ONE two, three, four!...'
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of Winston's mind the
impression made by his dream, and the rhythmic movements of the exercise
restored it somewhat. As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth,
wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper
during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling to think his way backward into
the dim period of his early childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult.
Beyond the late fifties everything faded. When there were no external
records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost
its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not
happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to
recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you
could assign nothing. Everything had been different then. Even the names of
countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One,
for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called
England or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been
called London.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been
at war, but it was evident that there had been a fairly long interval of
peace during his childhood, because one of his early memories was of an air
raid which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was the time
when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid
itself, but he did remember his father's hand clutching his own as they
hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and round
a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied
his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest. His
mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way behind them. She
was carrying his baby sister--or perhaps it was only a bundle of blankets
that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had been born
then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which he had
realized to be a Tube station.
There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other
people, packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above
the other. Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on
the floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by
side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap
pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were
blue and full of tears. He reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his
skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling
from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he was also
suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish
way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond
forgiveness and could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed
to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old man loved--a little
granddaughter, perhaps--had been killed. Every few minutes the old man kept
repeating:
'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I? That's what
comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We didn't ought to 'ave trusted
the buggers.'
But which buggers they didn't ought to have trusted Winston could not now
remember.
Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly
speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his
childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some
of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole
period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been
utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made
mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for
example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and
in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever
admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different
lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania
had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was
merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because
his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of
partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore
Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always
represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future
agreement with him was impossible.
The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he
forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were
gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be
good for the back muscles)--the frightening thing was that it might all be
true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or
that event, IT NEVER HAPPENED--that, surely, was more terrifying than mere
torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He,
Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short
a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his
own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all
others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the
same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls
the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the
present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature
alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from
everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was
an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control',
they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.
'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially.
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air.
His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know
and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling
carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which
cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of
them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim
to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the
guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then
to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and
then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process
to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to
induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of
the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word
'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.
The instructress had called them to attention again. 'And now let's see
which of us can touch our toes!' she said enthusiastically. 'Right over
from the hips, please, comrades. ONE-two! ONE-two!...'
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains all the way from
his heels to his buttocks and often ended by bringing on another coughing
fit. The half-pleasant quality went out of his meditations. The past, he
reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For
how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no
record outside your own memory? He tried to remember in what year he had
first heard mention of Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some
time in the sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party
histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the
Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually
pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous
world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their
strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great
gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides. There was no
knowing how much of this legend was true and how much invented. Winston
could not even remember at what date the Party itself had come into
existence. He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before
1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form--'English Socialism',
that is to say--it had been current earlier. Everything melted into mist.
Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not
true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the
Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest
childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. Just
once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary
proof of the falsification of an historical fact. And on that occasion----
'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.!
Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not
trying. Lower, please! THAT'S better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the
whole squad, and watch me.'
A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston's body. His face
remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment!
A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while
the instructress raised her arms above her head and--one could not say
gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and efficiency--bent over and
tucked the first joint of her fingers under her toes.
'THERE, comrades! THAT'S how I want to see you doing it. Watch me again.
I'm thirty-nine and I've had four children. Now look.' She bent over again.
'You see MY knees aren't bent. You can all do it if you want to,' she added
as she straightened herself up. 'Anyone under forty-five is perfectly
capable of touching his toes. We don't all have the privilege of fighting
in the front line, but at least we can all keep fit. Remember our boys on
the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think
what THEY have to put up with. Now try again. That's better, comrade,
that's MUCH better,' she added encouragingly as Winston, with a violent
lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with knees unbent, for the first
time in several years.
Chapter 4
With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the
telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started,
Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its
mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped
together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of
the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the
speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a
larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of
Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last
was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or
tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at
short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed
memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or
even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic
action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in,
whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous
furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each
contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated
jargon--not actually Newspeak, but consisting
largely of Newspeak words--which was used in the Ministry for internal
purposes. They ran:
times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite
fullwise upsub antefiling
With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside.
It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last.
The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably
mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.
Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the
appropriate issues of 'The Times', which slid out of the pneumatic tube
after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to
articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought
necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For
example, it appeared from 'The Times' of the seventeenth of March that Big
Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South
Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly
be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command
had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It
was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in
such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Or
again, 'The Times' of the nineteenth of December had published the official
forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the
fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth
Three-Year Plan. Today's issue contained a statement of the actual output,
from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly
wrong. Winston's job was to rectify the original figures by making them
agree with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very
simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short
a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise
(a 'categorical pledge' were the official words) that there would be
no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston
was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes
to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to
substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be
necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his
speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of 'The Times' and pushed
them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as
possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes
that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be
devoured by the flames.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he
did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all
the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number
of 'The Times' had been assembled and collated, that number would be
reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on
the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied
not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters,
leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs--to every kind of
literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or
ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past
was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party
could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any
item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the
needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was
a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was
necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done,
to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of
the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked,
consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all
copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded
and were due for destruction. A number of 'The Times' which might, because
of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big
Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing
its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also,
were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued
without any admission that any alteration had been made. Even the written
instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of
as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of
forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors,
misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the
interests of accuracy.
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's
figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one
piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing
with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of
connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much
a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great
deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For
example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of
boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as
sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked
the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim
that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was
no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very
likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew
how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every
quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps
half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every
class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a
shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become
uncertain.
Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other
side a small, precise-looking, dark-chinned man named Tillotson was working
steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very close
to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He had the air of trying to keep what
he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen. He looked up,
and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Winston's direction.
Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he was employed
on. People in the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs.
In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its
endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites,
there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name,
though he daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or
gesticulating in the Two Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next
to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at
tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been
vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a
certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple
of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems which had become
ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be
retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with its fifty workers or
thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the
huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other
swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were
the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts,
and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There
was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers, and its
teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices. There
were the armies of reference clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists
of books and periodicals which were due for recall. There were the vast
repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden
furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other,
quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole
effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this
fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other
rubbed out of existence.
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of
the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past
but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks,
telescreen programmes, plays, novels--with every conceivable kind of
information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan,
from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's
spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to
supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole
operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There
was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian
literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced
rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and
astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and
sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a
special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even
a whole sub-section--Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak--engaged in
producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed
packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it,
was permitted to look at.
Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while Winston was
working, but they were simple matters, and he had disposed of them before
the Two Minutes Hate interrupted him. When the Hate was over he returned
to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the
speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and settled down to his
main job of the morning.
Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a
tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and
intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a
mathematical problem--delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing
to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your
estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind
of thing. On occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of
'The Times' leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak.
He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons
rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:
The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in 'The Times' of December
3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent
persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority
before filing.
Winston read through the offending article. Big Brother's Order for the
Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted to praising the work of an
organization known as FFCC, which supplied cigarettes and other comforts
to the sailors in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a
prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special
mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second
Class.
Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no reasons given.
One could assume that Withers and his associates were now in disgrace, but
there had been no report of the matter in the Press or on the telescreen.
That was to be expected, since it was unusual for political offenders to
be put on trial or even publicly denounced. The great purges involving
thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals
who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed,
were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of
years. More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the
Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again. One never had the
smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases they might
not even be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally known to Winston, not
counting his parents, had disappeared at one time or another.
Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip. In the cubicle
across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching secretively over
his speakwrite. He raised his head for a moment: again the hostile
spectacle-flash. Winston wondered whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged
on the same job as himself. It was perfectly possible. So tricky a piece
of work would never be entrusted to a single person: on the other hand,
to turn it over to a committee would be to admit openly that an act of
fabrication was taking place. Very likely as many as a dozen people were
now working away on rival versions of what Big Brother had actually said.
And presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select this
version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes
of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie
would pass into the permanent records and become truth.
Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it was for
corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid of
a too-popular subordinate. Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had
been suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps--what was likeliest of
all--the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were a
necessary part of the mechanics of government. The only real clue lay in
the words 'refs unpersons', which indicated that Withers was already dead.
You could not invariably assume this to be the case when people were
arrested. Sometimes they were released and allowed to remain at liberty
for as much as a year or two years before being executed. Very occasionally
some person whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly
reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of
others by his testimony before vanishing, this time for ever. Withers,
however, was already an UNPERSON. He did not exist: he had never existed.
Winston decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse the tendency
of Big Brother's speech. It was better to make it deal with something
totally unconnected with its original subject.
He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and
thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a
victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth
Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. What was needed
was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready
made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently
died in battle, in heroic circumstances. There were occasions when Big
Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble,
rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example
worthy to be followed. Today he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was
true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of
print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into
existence.
Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and
began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once military
and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then
promptly answering them ('What lessons do we learn from this fact,
comrades? The lesson--which is also one of the fundamental principles
of Ingsoc--that,' etc., etc.), easy to imitate.
At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a
sub-machine gun, and a model helicopter. At six--a year early, by a special
relaxation of the rules--he had joined the Spies, at nine he had been a
troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police
after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal
tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district organizer of the Junior
Anti-Sex League. At nineteen he had designed a hand-grenade which had
been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had
killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twenty-three he had
perished in action. Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the
Indian Ocean with important despatches, he had weighted his body with his
machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches
and all--an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible to contemplate
without feelings of envy. Big Brother added a few remarks on the purity
and single-mindedness of Comrade Ogilvy's life. He was a total abstainer
and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium,
and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a
family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.
He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and
no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down
of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally.
Winston debated with himself whether to award Comrade Ogilvy the Order of
Conspicuous Merit: in the end he decided against it because of the
unnecessary cross-referencing that it would entail.
Once again he glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle. Something
seemed to tell him with certainty that Tillotson was busy on the same job
as himself. There was no way of knowing whose job would finally be adopted,
but he felt a profound conviction that it would be his own. Comrade Ogilvy,
unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck him as curious that you
could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never
existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of
forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the
same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
Chapter 5
In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked
slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From
the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On
the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall,
where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.
'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at Winston's back.
He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research
Department. Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right word. You did not
have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose
society was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a
specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts
now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large,
protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search
your face closely while he was speaking to you.
'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,' he said.
'Not one!' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've tried all over
the place. They don't exist any longer.'
Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones
which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past.
At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops
were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning
wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You could
only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on
the 'free' market.
'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added untruthfully.
The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and faced
Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the end
of the counter.
'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?' said Syme.
'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see it on the
flicks, I suppose.'
'A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.
His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know you,' the eyes seemed
to say, 'I see through you. I know very well why you didn't go to see
those prisoners hanged.' In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously
orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of
helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of
thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love.
Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects
and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on
which he was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a
little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.
'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently. 'I think it spoils it
when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above
all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue--a quite bright
blue. That's the detail that appeals to me.'
'Nex', please!' yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.
Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On to each was
dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew,
a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and
one saccharine tablet.
'There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said Syme. 'Let's pick
up a gin on the way.'
The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded
their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the
metal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew,
a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston took up his
mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the
oily-tasting stuff down. When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he
suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of
the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy
pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat. Neither of them
spoke again till they had emptied their pannikins. From the table at
Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and
continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which
pierced the general uproar of the room.
'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising his voice to
overcome the noise.
'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating.'
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his
pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his
cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak
without shouting.
'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting
the language into its final shape--the shape it's going to have when nobody
speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will
have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job
is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words--scores
of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to
the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become
obsolete before the year 2050.'
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then
continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark face
had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown
almost dreamy.
'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great
wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns
that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also
the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is
simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in
itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what
need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well--better,
because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you
want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole
string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the
rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you
want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but
in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the
whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in
reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was
B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of
Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of
enthusiasm.
'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost
sadly. 'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read
some of those pieces that you write in "The Times" occasionally. They're
good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick
to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning.
You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that
Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller
every year?'
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not
trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the
dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible,
because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that
can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning
rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the
process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year
fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little
smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing
thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control.
But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will
be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc
is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever
occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a
single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation
as we are having now?'
'Except----' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the proles,' but he
checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in
some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
'The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly. 'By 2050--earlier,
probably--all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole
literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton, Byron--they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed
into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory
of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change.
Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is
slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate
of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we
understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will
be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too
plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear.
It is written in his face.
Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a little sideways
in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his left the man
with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young
woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back
to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with
everything that he said. From time to time Winston caught some such remark
as 'I think you're so right, I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful
and rather silly feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an
instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man by sight,
though he knew no more about him than that he held some important post
in the Fiction Department. He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular
throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and
because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the
light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was
slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of
his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just
once Winston caught a phrase--'complete and final elimination of
Goldsteinism'--jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece,
like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a
quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the
man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature.
He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against
thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the
atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the
heroes on the Malabar front--it made no difference. Whatever it was, you
could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc.
As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down,
Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but
some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was
his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but
it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in
unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was
tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The voice from the other table
quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din.
'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know
it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words
that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse,
applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.'
Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought
it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him
and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a
thought-criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There was something
subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion,
aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was
unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big
Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with
sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of
information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint
air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have
been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut
Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an
unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place
was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been
used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself,
it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme's
fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme
grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret
opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would
anybody else, for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not
enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said.
Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that bloody fool'.
Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading
his way across the room--a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a
froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at
neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole
appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so much so that although
he was wearing the regulation overalls, it was almost impossible not to
think of him as being dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red
neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture of
dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did,
indeed, invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other
physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both
with a cheery 'Hullo, hullo!' and sat down at the table, giving off an
intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over his pink face.
His powers of sweating were extraordinary. At the Community Centre you
could always tell when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of
the bat handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there was a
long column of words, and was studying it with an ink-pencil between his
fingers.
'Look at him working away in the lunch hour,' said Parsons, nudging
Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that you've got there, old boy? Something
a bit too brainy for me, I expect. Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm
chasing you. It's that sub you forgot to give me.'
'Which sub is that?' said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About
a quarter of one's salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions,
which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.
'For Hate Week. You know--the house-by-house fund. I'm treasurer for our
block. We're making an all-out effort--going to put on a tremendous show.
I tell you, it won't be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the
biggest outfit of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.'
Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons
entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.
'By the way, old boy,' he said. 'I hear that little beggar of mine let fly
at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing-down for it.
In fact I told him I'd take the catapult away if he does it again.'
'I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,' said
Winston.
'Ah, well--what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn't it?
Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness!
All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course. D'you know what
that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike
out Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off
from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man. They
kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when
they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.'
'What did they do that for?' said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons
went on triumphantly:
'My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent--might have been dropped
by parachute, for instance. But here's the point, old boy. What do you
think put her on to him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a
funny kind of shoes--said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes like that
before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper
of seven, eh?'
'What happened to the man?' said Winston.
'Ah, that I couldn't say, of course. But I wouldn't be altogether surprised
if----' Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue
for the explosion.
'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.
'Of course we can't afford to take chances,' agreed Winston dutifully.
'What I mean to say, there is a war on,' said Parsons.
As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated from the
telescreen just above their heads. However, it was not the proclamation of
a military victory this time, but merely an announcement from the Ministry
of Plenty.
'Comrades!' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention, comrades! We have
glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now
completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the
standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past
year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous
demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and
paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big
Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed
upon us. Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs----'
The phrase 'our new, happy life' recurred several times. It had been a
favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention
caught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity,
a sort of edified boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was
aware that they were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged
out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco.
With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it was seldom possible to
fill a pipe to the top. Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he
held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and
he had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to
the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the
telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank
Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And
only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was
to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could
swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons
swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature
at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious
desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that
last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too--in some more
complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE
in the possession of a memory?
The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As
compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses,
more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters,
more books, more babies--more of everything except disease, crime, and
insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was
whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up
his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across
the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated
resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like
this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen.
A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of
innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close
together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays,
coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a
sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and
dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort
of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had
a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly
different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never
been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that
were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety,
rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces,
bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes
insufficient--nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though,
of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this
was NOT the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the
discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness
of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty
soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil
tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind
of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would
still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue
overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small,
curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes
darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought
Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type
set up by the Party as an ideal--tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed
maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree--existed and even
predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people
in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that
beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing
stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and
fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to
flourish best under the dominion of the Party.
The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call
and gave way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the
bombardment of figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.
'The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a good job this year,' he said
with a knowing shake of his head. 'By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose
you haven't got any razor blades you can let me have?'
'Not one,' said Winston. 'I've been using the same blade for six weeks
myself.'
'Ah, well--just thought I'd ask you, old boy.'
'Sorry,' said Winston.
The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the
Ministry's announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some
reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her
wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those
children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs Parsons would
be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O'Brien
would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized.
The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized.
The little beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine
corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized. And the girl
with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department--she would never be
vaporized either. It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would
survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for
survival, it was not easy to say.
At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk. The
girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It
was the girl with dark hair. She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but
with curious intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away
again.
The sweat started out on Winston's backbone. A horrible pang of terror
went through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging
uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him
about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already been at
the table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday, at
any rate, during the Two Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him
when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had
been to listen to him and make sure whether he was shouting loudly enough.
His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member
of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was
the greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she had been looking
at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible
that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly
dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place
or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away.
A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to
yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of
having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on
your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example)
was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak:
FACECRIME, it was called.
The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not
really following him about, perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so
close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it
carefully on the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work,
if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the next
table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the
cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end
must not be wasted. Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it
away in his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.
'Did I ever tell you, old boy,' he said, chuckling round the stem of his
pipe, 'about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old
market-woman's skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster
of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches.
Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard!
That's a first-rate training they give them in the Spies nowadays--better
than in my day, even. What d'you think's the latest thing they've served
them out with? Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little
girl brought one home the other night--tried it out on our sitting-room
door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the
hole. Of course it's only a toy, mind you. Still, gives 'em the right
idea, eh?'
At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. It was the
signal to return to work. All three men sprang to their feet to join in
the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of
Winston's cigarette.
Chapter 6
Winston was writing in his diary:
It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow
side-street near one of the big railway stations. She was standing near a
doorway in the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light. She
had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed
to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party
women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the street, and no
telescreens. She said two dollars. I----
For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed
his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept
recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of
filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall,
to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window--to do any
violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was
tormenting him.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment
the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible
symptom. He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks
back; a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five to
forty, tallish and thin, carrying a brief-case. They were a few metres
apart when the left side of the man's face was suddenly contorted by a sort
of spasm. It happened again just as they were passing one another: it was
only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but
obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is
done for. And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly
unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There
was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see.
He drew his breath and went on writing:
I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a
basement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the
table, turned down very low. She----
His teeth were set on edge. He would have liked to spit. Simultaneously
with the woman in the basement kitchen he thought of Katharine, his wife.
Winston was married--had been married, at any rate: probably he still was
married, so far as he knew his wife was not dead. He seemed to breathe
again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded
of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless
alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be
imagined as doing so. Only the proles used scent. In his mind the smell
of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication.
When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years
or thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, of course, but
it was one of those rules that you could occasionally nerve yourself to
break. It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be
caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour camp:
not more, if you had committed no other offence. And it was easy enough,
provided that you could avoid being caught in the act. The poorer quarters
swarmed with women who were ready to sell themselves. Some could even be
purchased for a bottle of gin, which the proles were not supposed to drink.
Tacitly the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet
for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery
did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless and only
involved the women of a submerged and despised class. The unforgivable
crime was promiscuity between Party members. But--though this was one
of the crimes that the accused in the great purges invariably confessed
to--it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually happening.
The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming
loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared
purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much
as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All
marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee
appointed for the purpose, and--though the principle was never clearly
stated--permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave
the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only
recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of
the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting
minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain
words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from
childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the Junior
Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All
children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (ARTSEM, it was
called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston
was aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in
with the general ideology of the Party. The Party was trying to kill the
sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty
it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should
be so. And as far as the women were concerned, the Party's efforts were
largely successful.
He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten--nearly eleven years
since they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For
days at a time he was capable of forgetting that he had ever been married.
They had only been together for about fifteen months. The Party did not
permit divorce, but it rather encouraged separation in cases where there
were no children.
Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid
movements. She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called
noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing
behind it. Very early in her married life he had decided--though perhaps
it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people--that
she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had
ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan,
and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of
swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. 'The human sound-track' he
nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he could have endured living with her
if it had not been for just one thing--sex.
As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her
was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that
even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she
was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidity
of her muscles managed to convey that impression. She would lie there
with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but SUBMITTING. It was
extraordinarily embarrassing, and, after a while, horrible. But even then
he could have borne living with her if it had been agreed that they should
remain celibate. But curiously enough it was Katharine who refused this.
They must, she said, produce a child if they could. So the performance
continued to happen, once a week quite regularly, whenever it was not
impossible. She even used to remind him of it in the morning, as something
which had to be done that evening and which must not be forgotten. She had
two names for it. One was 'making a baby', and the other was 'our duty to
the Party' (yes, she had actually used that phrase). Quite soon he grew to
have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round. But
luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying,
and soon afterwards they parted.
Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and
wrote:
She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of
preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up
her skirt. I----
He saw himself standing there in the dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs
and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in his heart a feeling of defeat and
resentment which even at that moment was mixed up with the thought of
Katharine's white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic power of the Party.
Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not have a woman of
his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years? But a real
love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The women of the Party were
all alike. Chastity was as deep ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By
careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that
was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by
lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling
had been driven out of them. His reason told him that there must be
exceptions, but his heart did not believe it. They were all impregnable,
as the Party intended that they should be. And what he wanted, more even
than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were
only once in his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was
rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. Even to have awakened Katharine, if he
could have achieved it, would have been like a seduction, although she was
his wife.
But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He wrote:
I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light----
After the darkness the feeble light of the paraffin lamp had seemed very
bright. For the first time he could see the woman properly. He had taken a
step towards her and then halted, full of lust and terror. He was painfully
conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here. It was perfectly
possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out: for that matter
they might be waiting outside the door at this moment. If he went away
without even doing what he had come here to do----!
It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed. What he had
suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was OLD. The paint was
plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack
like a cardboard mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the
truly dreadful detail was that her mouth had fallen a little open,
revealing nothing except a cavernous blackness. She had no teeth at all.
He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:
When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old
at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same.
He pressed his fingers against his eyelids again. He had written it down
at last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge
to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
Chapter 7
'If there is hope,' wrote Winston, 'it lies in the proles.'
If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those
swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania,
could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could
not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had
no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if
the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was
inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than
twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the
voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only
they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no
need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like
a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to
pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to
do it? And yet----!
He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a
tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women's voices--had burst from a
side-street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger
and despair, a deep, loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went humming on like the
reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It's started! he had thought.
A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot
it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls
of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed
passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke
down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the
stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things,
but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supply
had unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by
the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of
others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism
and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh
outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming
down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of
one another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the
handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a
moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only
a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that
about anything that mattered?
He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they
have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the
Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles
from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously oppressed by
the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women had been forced
to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a
matter of fact), children had been sold into the factories at the age
of six. But simultaneously, true to the Principles of doublethink, the
Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in
subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In
reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to
know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other
activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned
loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life
that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were
born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed
through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married
at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part,
at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty
quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling,
filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not
difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them,
spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few
individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt
was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not
desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that
was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to
whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or
shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes
did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas,
they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils
invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles did not even
have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them
very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in London, a whole
world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and
racketeers of every description; but since it all happened among the proles
themselves, it was of no importance. In all questions of morals they were
allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the
Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce
was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been
permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it.
They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and
animals are free.'
Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. It
had begun itching again. The thing you invariably came back to was the
impossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution had really been
like. He took out of the drawer a copy of a children's history textbook
which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copying a passage into
the diary:
In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was
not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable
place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and
thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to
sleep under. Children no older than you had to work twelve hours a day for
cruel masters who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and
fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water. But in among all
this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses
that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look
after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly
men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page.
You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a
frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was
called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else
was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and
everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses,
all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could
throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to
death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and
bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'. The chief of
all the capitalists was called the King, and----
But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of the
bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the
pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's
Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe. There was also
something called the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, which would probably not be
mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every
capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his
factories.
How could you tell how much of it was lies? It MIGHT be true that the
average human being was better off now than he had been before the
Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your
own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were
intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It
struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not
its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its
listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only
to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals
that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party
member, were neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary
jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging
a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the
Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering--a world of steel
and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of
warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the
same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting,
triumphing, persecuting--three hundred million people all with the same
face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled
to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that
smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of
London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it
was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair,
fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.
He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the
telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today
had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations--that they
lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger,
happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years
ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The Party claimed,
for example, that today 40 per cent of adult proles were literate: before
the Revolution, it was said, the number had only been 15 per cent. The
Party claimed that the infant mortality rate was now only 160 per
thousand, whereas before the Revolution it had been 300--and so it went
on. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be
that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one
accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might
never have been any such law as the JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, or any such creature
as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten,
the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed--AFTER the
event: that was what counted--concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of
falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty
seconds. In 1973, it must have been--at any rate, it was at about the time
when he and Katharine had parted. But the really relevant date was seven
or eight years earlier.
The story really began in the middle sixties, the period of the great
purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out
once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother
himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and
counter-revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding no one knew
where, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the majority
had been executed after spectacular public trials at which they made
confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named
Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three
had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more,
so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had
suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way.
They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the
enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various
trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother
which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage
causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to
these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given
posts which were in fact sinecures but which sounded important. All three
had written long, abject articles in 'The Times', analysing the reasons
for their defection and promising to make amends.
Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of them
in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination
with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were men
far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, almost the last great
figures left over from the heroic days of the Party. The glamour of the
underground struggle and the civil war still faintly clung to them. He had
the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing
blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that
of Big Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed
with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No one who had
once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end.
They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.
There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise
even to be seen in the neighbourhood of such people. They were sitting
in silence before glasses of the gin flavoured with cloves which was the
speciality of the cafe. Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance
had most impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous caricaturist,
whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular opinion before and
during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals, his cartoons were
appearing in The Times. They were simply an imitation of his earlier
manner, and curiously lifeless and unconvincing. Always they were a
rehashing of the ancient themes--slum tenements, starving children, street
battles, capitalists in top hats--even on the barricades the capitalists
still seemed to cling to their top hats an endless, hopeless effort to
get back into the past. He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy
grey hair, his face pouched and seamed, with thick negroid lips. At one
time he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging,
sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking
up before one's eyes, like a mountain crumbling.
It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember how he
had come to be in the cafe at such a time. The place was almost empty. A
tinny music was trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat in their
corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought
fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with
the pieces set out but no game started. And then, for perhaps half a minute
in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they were
playing changed, and the tone of the music changed too. There came into
it--but it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked,
braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And
then a voice from the telescreen was singing:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's
ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first
time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing
AT WHAT he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.
A little later all three were re-arrested. It appeared that they had
engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At
their second trial they confessed to all their old crimes over again, with
a whole string of new ones. They were executed, and their fate was recorded
in the Party histories, a warning to posterity. About five years after
this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just
flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment
of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then
forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance.
It was a half-page torn out of 'The Times' of about ten years earlier--the
top half of the page, so that it included the date--and it contained a
photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York. Prominent
in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was
no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the caption at the
bottom.
The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that
date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret airfield
in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred with
members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed important
military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's memory because it chanced
to be midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in countless
other places as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the
confessions were lies.
Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston
had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had
actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was
concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil
bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory.
It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have
been published to the world and its significance made known.
He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph
was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of paper.
Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the point of
view of the telescreen.
He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as
to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face
expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be
controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your
heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He let
what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the
fear that some accident--a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for
instance--would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped
the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers.
Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes.
That was ten--eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept that
photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers
seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself,
as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party's hold
upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which
existed no longer HAD ONCE existed?
But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes,
the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when he
made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must
have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men had betrayed
their country. Since then there had been other changes--two, three,
he could not remember how many. Very likely the confessions had been
rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer
had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but changed
continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that
he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken.
The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the
ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:
I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was
a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it
had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun;
today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be ALONE in
holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being
a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also
be wrong.
He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of
Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into
his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon
you--something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your
brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to
deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that
two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable
that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their
position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very
existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The
heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that
they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right.
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the
force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past
and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is
controllable what then?
But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The face
of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association, had floated into his
mind. He knew, with more certainty than before, that O'Brien was on his
side. He was writing the diary for O'Brien--TO O'Brien: it was like an
interminable letter which no one would ever read, but which was addressed
to a particular person and took its colour from that fact.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was
their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of
the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party
intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he
would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the
right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the
true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid
world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet,
objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre. With the feeling that
he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important
axiom, he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is
granted, all else follows.
Chapter 8
From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting
coffee--real coffee, not Victory Coffee--came floating out into the street.
Winston paused involuntarily. For perhaps two seconds he was back in the
half-forgotten world of his childhood. Then a door banged, seeming to cut
off the smell as abruptly as though it had been a sound.
He had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer
was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed
an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain
that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked.
In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except
in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping
he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything
that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself,
was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak:
OWNLIFE, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this
evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had
tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and
suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting
games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed
intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered
off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again,
losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which
direction he was going.
'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in the proles.'
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a
palpable absurdity. He was somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured slums
to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. He was
walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered
doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow
curiously suggestive of ratholes. There were puddles of filthy water here
and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down
narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in
astonishing numbers--girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths,
and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you
what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures
shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played
in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers.
Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up.
Most of the people paid no attention to Winston; a few eyed him with a
sort of guarded curiosity. Two monstrous women with brick-red forearms
folded across their aprons were talking outside a doorway. Winston caught
scraps of conversation as he approached.
'"Yes," I says to 'er, "that's all very well," I says. "But if you'd of
been in my place you'd of done the same as what I done. It's easy to
criticize," I says, "but you ain't got the same problems as what I got."'
'Ah,' said the other, 'that's jest it. That's jest where it is.'
The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile
silence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind
of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar
animal. The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a
street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless
you had definite business there. The patrols might stop you if you happened
to run into them. 'May I see your papers, comrade? What are you doing here?
What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home?'--and so on and
so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual
route: but it was enough to draw attention to you if the Thought Police
heard about it.
Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warning
from all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits. A
young woman leapt out of a doorway a little ahead of Winston, grabbed up a
tiny child playing in a puddle, whipped her apron round it, and leapt back
again, all in one movement. At the same instant a man in a concertina-like
black suit, who had emerged from a side alley, ran towards Winston,
pointing excitedly to the sky.
'Steamer!' he yelled. 'Look out, guv'nor! Bang over'ead! Lay down quick!'
'Steamer' was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to
rocket bombs. Winston promptly flung himself on his face. The proles were
nearly always right when they gave you a warning of this kind. They seemed
to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance
when a rocket was coming, although the rockets supposedly travelled faster
than sound. Winston clasped his forearms above his head. There was a roar
that seemed to make the pavement heave; a shower of light objects pattered
on to his back. When he stood up he found that he was covered with
fragments of glass from the nearest window.
He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres up the
street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of
plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There
was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in
the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he
saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody
stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned
down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out
of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of
the streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly
twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ('pubs',
they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors,
endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust,
and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting house-front three men
were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a
folded-up newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder.
Even before he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces,
Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was
obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few
paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men
were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point
of blows.
'Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending
in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!'
'Yes, it 'as, then!'
'No, it 'as not! Back 'ome I got the 'ole lot of 'em for over two years
wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes 'em down reg'lar as the clock. An'
I tell you, no number ending in seven----'
'Yes, a seven 'AS won! I could pretty near tell you the bleeding number.
Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February--second week in February.'
'February your grandmother! I got it all down in black and white. An' I
tell you, no number----'
'Oh, pack it in!' said the third man.
They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone
thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces.
The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public
event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that
there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal
if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their
folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was
concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of
intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole
tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and
lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery,
which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed
everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary.
Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being
non-existent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between
one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that.
When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at
the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of
faith. The street into which he had turned ran downhill. He had a feeling
that he had been in this neighbourhood before, and that there was a main
thoroughfare not far away. From somewhere ahead there came a din of
shouting voices. The street took a sharp turn and then ended in a flight
of steps which led down into a sunken alley where a few stall-keepers
were selling tired-looking vegetables. At this moment Winston remembered
where he was. The alley led out into the main street, and down the next
turning, not five minutes away, was the junk-shop where he had bought the
blank book which was now his diary. And in a small stationer's shop not
far away he had bought his penholder and his bottle of ink.
He paused for a moment at the top of the steps. On the opposite side of
the alley there was a dingy little pub whose windows appeared to be frosted
over but in reality were merely coated with dust. A very old man, bent but
active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn,
pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching, it
occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had
already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others
like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of
capitalism. In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas
had been formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly
been wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few
who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual
surrender. If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful
account of conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a
prole. Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into
his diary came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold
of him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that
old man and question him. He would say to him: 'Tell me about your life
when you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things better
than they are now, or were they worse?'
Hurriedly, lest he should have time to become frightened, he descended the
steps and crossed the narrow street. It was madness of course. As usual,
there was no definite rule against talking to proles and frequenting their
pubs, but it was far too unusual an action to pass unnoticed. If the
patrols appeared he might plead an attack of faintness, but it was not
likely that they would believe him. He pushed open the door, and a hideous
cheesy smell of sour beer hit him in the face. As he entered the din of
voices dropped to about half its volume. Behind his back he could feel
everyone eyeing his blue overalls. A game of darts which was going on at
the other end of the room interrupted itself for perhaps as much as thirty
seconds. The old man whom he had followed was standing at the bar, having
some kind of altercation with the barman, a large, stout, hook-nosed young
man with enormous forearms. A knot of others, standing round with glasses
in their hands, were watching the scene.
'I arst you civil enough, didn't I?' said the old man, straightening his
shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me you ain't got a pint mug in the
'ole bleeding boozer?'
'And what in hell's name IS a pint?' said the barman, leaning forward with
the tips of his fingers on the counter.
''Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a pint is! Why,
a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four quarts to the gallon.
'Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.'
'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and half
litre--that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf in front
of you.'
'I likes a pint,' persisted the old man. 'You could 'a drawed me off a pint
easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.'
'When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,' said the
barman, with a glance at the other customers.
There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused by Winston's entry
seemed to disappear. The old man's white-stubbled face had flushed pink. He
turned away, muttering to himself, and bumped into Winston. Winston caught
him gently by the arm.
'May I offer you a drink?' he said.
'You're a gent,' said the other, straightening his shoulders again. He
appeared not to have noticed Winston's blue overalls. 'Pint!' he added
aggressively to the barman. 'Pint of wallop.'
The barman swished two half-litres of dark-brown beer into thick glasses
which he had rinsed in a bucket under the counter. Beer was the only drink
you could get in prole pubs. The proles were supposed not to drink gin,
though in practice they could get hold of it easily enough. The game of
darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun
talking about lottery tickets. Winston's presence was forgotten for a
moment. There was a deal table under the window where he and the old man
could talk without fear of being overheard. It was horribly dangerous, but
at any rate there was no telescreen in the room, a point he had made sure
of as soon as he came in.
''E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as he settled down
behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And a 'ole
litre's too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.'
'You must have seen great changes since you were a young man,' said
Winston tentatively.
The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and
from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the bar-room
that he expected the changes to have occurred.
'The beer was better,' he said finally. 'And cheaper! When I was a young
man, mild beer--wallop we used to call it--was fourpence a pint. That was
before the war, of course.'
'Which war was that?' said Winston.
'It's all wars,' said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his
shoulders straightened again. ''Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!'
In his lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam's apple made a surprisingly rapid
up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. Winston went to the bar and
came back with two more half-litres. The old man appeared to have forgotten
his prejudice against drinking a full litre.
'You are very much older than I am,' said Winston. 'You must have been a
grown man before I was born. You can remember what it was like in the old
days, before the Revolution. People of my age don't really know anything
about those times. We can only read about them in books, and what it says
in the books may not be true. I should like your opinion on that. The
history books say that life before the Revolution was completely different
from what it is now. There was the most terrible oppression, injustice,
poverty worse than anything we can imagine. Here in London, the great mass
of the people never had enough to eat from birth to death. Half of them
hadn't even boots on their feet. They worked twelve hours a day, they left
school at nine, they slept ten in a room. And at the same time there were
a very few people, only a few thousands--the capitalists, they were
called--who were rich and powerful. They owned everything that there was
to own. They lived in great gorgeous houses with thirty servants, they
rode about in motor-cars and four-horse carriages, they drank champagne,
they wore top hats----'
The old man brightened suddenly.
'Top 'ats!' he said. 'Funny you should mention 'em. The same thing come
into my 'ead only yesterday, I dono why. I was jest thinking, I ain't seen
a top 'at in years. Gorn right out, they 'ave. The last time I wore one
was at my sister-in-law's funeral. And that was--well, I couldn't give you
the date, but it must'a been fifty years ago. Of course it was only 'ired
for the occasion, you understand.'
'It isn't very important about the top hats,' said Winston patiently.
'The point is, these capitalists--they and a few lawyers and priests and
so forth who lived on them--were the lords of the earth. Everything existed
for their benefit. You--the ordinary people, the workers--were their
slaves. They could do what they liked with you. They could ship you off to
Canada like cattle. They could sleep with your daughters if they chose.
They could order you to be flogged with something called a cat-o'-nine
tails. You had to take your cap off when you passed them. Every capitalist
went about with a gang of lackeys who----'
The old man brightened again.
'Lackeys!' he said. 'Now there's a word I ain't 'eard since ever so long.
Lackeys! That reg'lar takes me back, that does. I recollect--oh, donkey's
years ago--I used to sometimes go to 'Yde Park of a Sunday afternoon to
'ear the blokes making speeches. Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews,
Indians--all sorts there was. And there was one bloke--well, I couldn't
give you 'is name, but a real powerful speaker 'e was. 'E didn't 'alf
give it 'em! "Lackeys!" 'e says, "lackeys of the bourgeoisie! Flunkies of
the ruling class!" Parasites--that was another of them. And 'yenas--'e
definitely called 'em 'yenas. Of course 'e was referring to the Labour
Party, you understand.'
Winston had the feeling that they were talking at cross-purposes.
'What I really wanted to know was this,' he said. 'Do you feel that you
have more freedom now than you had in those days? Are you treated more
like a human being? In the old days, the rich people, the people at the
top----'
'The 'Ouse of Lords,' put in the old man reminiscently.
'The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is, were these people
able to treat you as an inferior, simply because they were rich and you
were poor? Is it a fact, for instance, that you had to call them "Sir" and
take off your cap when you passed them?'
The old man appeared to think deeply. He drank off about a quarter of his
beer before answering.
'Yes,' he said. 'They liked you to touch your cap to 'em. It showed
respect, like. I didn't agree with it, myself, but I done it often enough.
Had to, as you might say.'
'And was it usual--I'm only quoting what I've read in history books--was
it usual for these people and their servants to push you off the pavement
into the gutter?'
'One of 'em pushed me once,' said the old man. 'I recollect it as if it
was yesterday. It was Boat Race night--terribly rowdy they used to get on
Boat Race night--and I bumps into a young bloke on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Quite a gent, 'e was--dress shirt, top 'at, black overcoat. 'E was kind
of zig-zagging across the pavement, and I bumps into 'im accidental-like.
'E says, "Why can't you look where you're going?" 'e says. I say, "Ju think
you've bought the bleeding pavement?" 'E says, "I'll twist your bloody 'ead
off if you get fresh with me." I says, "You're drunk. I'll give you in
charge in 'alf a minute," I says. An' if you'll believe me, 'e puts 'is
'and on my chest and gives me a shove as pretty near sent me under the
wheels of a bus. Well, I was young in them days, and I was going to 'ave
fetched 'im one, only----'
A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man's memory was
nothing but a rubbish-heap of details. One could question him all day
without getting any real information. The party histories might still be
true, after a fashion: they might even be completely true. He made a last
attempt.
'Perhaps I have not made myself clear,' he said. 'What I'm trying to say
is this. You have been alive a very long time; you lived half your life
before the Revolution. In 1925, for instance, you were already grown up.
Would you say from what you can remember, that life in 1925 was better
than it is now, or worse? If you could choose, would you prefer to live
then or now?'
The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He finished up his
beer, more slowly than before. When he spoke it was with a tolerant
philosophical air, as though the beer had mellowed him.
'I know what you expect me to say,' he said. 'You expect me to say as I'd
sooner be young again. Most people'd say they'd sooner be young, if you
arst 'em. You got your 'ealth and strength when you're young. When you
get to my time of life you ain't never well. I suffer something wicked
from my feet, and my bladder's jest terrible. Six and seven times a night
it 'as me out of bed. On the other 'and, there's great advantages in being
a old man. You ain't got the same worries. No truck with women, and that's
a great thing. I ain't 'ad a woman for near on thirty year, if you'd
credit it. Nor wanted to, what's more.'
Winston sat back against the window-sill. It was no use going on. He was
about to buy some more beer when the old man suddenly got up and shuffled
rapidly into the stinking urinal at the side of the room. The extra
half-litre was already working on him. Winston sat for a minute or two
gazing at his empty glass, and hardly noticed when his feet carried him out
into the street again. Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the
huge and simple question, 'Was life better before the Revolution than it
is now?' would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect
it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the
ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They
remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for
a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the
swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant
facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant,
which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and
written records were falsified--when that happened, the claim of the Party
to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted,
because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard
against which it could be tested.
At this moment his train of thought stopped abruptly. He halted and looked
up. He was in a narrow street, with a few dark little shops, interspersed
among dwelling-houses. Immediately above his head there hung three
discoloured metal balls which looked as if they had once been gilded. He
seemed to know the place. Of course! He was standing outside the junk-shop
where he had bought the diary.
A twinge of fear went through him. It had been a sufficiently rash act to
buy the book in the beginning, and he had sworn never to come near the
place again. And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander,
his feet had brought him back here of their own accord. It was precisely
against suicidal impulses of this kind that he had hoped to guard himself
by opening the diary. At the same time he noticed that although it was
nearly twenty-one hours the shop was still open. With the feeling that he
would be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement, he
stepped through the doorway. If questioned, he could plausibly say that
he was trying to buy razor blades.
The proprietor had just lighted a hanging oil lamp which gave off an
unclean but friendly smell. He was a man of perhaps sixty, frail and
bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes distorted by thick
spectacles. His hair was almost white, but his eyebrows were bushy and
still black. His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact
that he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air
of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or
perhaps a musician. His voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent
less debased than that of the majority of proles.
'I recognized you on the pavement,' he said immediately. 'You're the
gentleman that bought the young lady's keepsake album. That was a beautiful
bit of paper, that was. Cream-laid, it used to be called. There's been no
paper like that made for--oh, I dare say fifty years.' He peered at Winston
over the top of his spectacles. 'Is there anything special I can do for
you? Or did you just want to look round?'
'I was passing,' said Winston vaguely. 'I just looked in. I don't want
anything in particular.'
'It's just as well,' said the other, 'because I don't suppose I could have
satisfied you.' He made an apologetic gesture with his softpalmed hand.
'You see how it is; an empty shop, you might say. Between you and me, the
antique trade's just about finished. No demand any longer, and no stock
either. Furniture, china, glass it's all been broken up by degrees. And
of course the metal stuff's mostly been melted down. I haven't seen a brass
candlestick in years.'
The tiny interior of the shop was in fact uncomfortably full, but there
was almost nothing in it of the slightest value. The floorspace was very
restricted, because all round the walls were stacked innumerable dusty
picture-frames. In the window there were trays of nuts and bolts, worn-out
chisels, penknives with broken blades, tarnished watches that did not even
pretend to be in going order, and other miscellaneous rubbish. Only on a
small table in the corner was there a litter of odds and ends--lacquered
snuffboxes, agate brooches, and the like--which looked as though they might
include something interesting. As Winston wandered towards the table his
eye was caught by a round, smooth thing that gleamed softly in the
lamplight, and he picked it up.
It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making
almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in
both the colour and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified
by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that
recalled a rose or a sea anemone.
'What is it?' said Winston, fascinated.
'That's coral, that is,' said the old man. 'It must have come from the
Indian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in the glass. That wasn't made
less than a hundred years ago. More, by the look of it.'
'It's a beautiful thing,' said Winston.
'It is a beautiful thing,' said the other appreciatively. 'But there's not
many that'd say so nowadays.' He coughed. 'Now, if it so happened that you
wanted to buy it, that'd cost you four dollars. I can remember when a thing
like that would have fetched eight pounds, and eight pounds was--well, I
can't work it out, but it was a lot of money. But who cares about genuine
antiques nowadays--even the few that's left?'
Winston immediately paid over the four dollars and slid the coveted thing
into his pocket. What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty
as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different
from the present one. The soft, rainwatery glass was not like any glass
that he had ever seen. The thing was doubly attractive because of its
apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been
intended as a paperweight. It was very heavy in his pocket, but fortunately
it did not make much of a bulge. It was a queer thing, even a compromising
thing, for a Party member to have in his possession. Anything old, and for
that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect. The old man had
grown noticeably more cheerful after receiving the four dollars. Winston
realized that he would have accepted three or even two.
'There's another room upstairs that you might care to take a look at,' he
said. 'There's not much in it. Just a few pieces. We'll do with a light if
we're going upstairs.'
He lit another lamp, and, with bowed back, led the way slowly up the
steep and worn stairs and along a tiny passage, into a room which did
not give on the street but looked out on a cobbled yard and a forest of
chimney-pots. Winston noticed that the furniture was still arranged as
though the room were meant to be lived in. There was a strip of carpet on
the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternly arm-chair
drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour
face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupying
nearly a quarter of the room, was an enormous bed with the mattress still
on it.
'We lived here till my wife died,' said the old man half apologetically.
'I'm selling the furniture off by little and little. Now that's a beautiful
mahogany bed, or at least it would be if you could get the bugs out of it.
But I dare say you'd find it a little bit cumbersome.'
He was holding the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room, and
in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting. The thought
flitted through Winston's mind that it would probably be quite easy to
rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It
was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but
the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral
memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in
a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in
the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with
nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing
of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.
'There's no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring.
'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things. Too expensive.
And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. Now that's a nice
gateleg table in the corner there. Though of course you'd have to put new
hinges on it if you wanted to use the flaps.'
There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had already
gravitated towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The hunting-down
and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the
prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed
anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960. The old
man, still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of a picture in a
rosewood frame which hung on the other side of the fireplace, opposite
the bed.
'Now, if you happen to be interested in old prints at all----' he began
delicately.
Winston came across to examine the picture. It was a steel engraving of an
oval building with rectangular windows, and a small tower in front. There
was a railing running round the building, and at the rear end there was
what appeared to be a statue. Winston gazed at it for some moments. It
seemed vaguely familiar, though he did not remember the statue.
'The frame's fixed to the wall,' said the old man, 'but I could unscrew it
for you, I dare say.'
'I know that building,' said Winston finally. 'It's a ruin now. It's in
the middle of the street outside the Palace of Justice.'
'That's right. Outside the Law Courts. It was bombed in--oh, many years
ago. It was a church at one time, St Clement Danes, its name was.' He
smiled apologetically, as though conscious of saying something slightly
ridiculous, and added: 'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's!'
'What's that?' said Winston.
'Oh--"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's." That was a rhyme
we had when I was a little boy. How it goes on I don't remember, but I do
know it ended up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a
chopper to chop off your head." It was a kind of a dance. They held out
their arms for you to pass under, and when they came to "Here comes a
chopper to chop off your head" they brought their arms down and caught you.
It was just names of churches. All the London churches were in it--all the
principal ones, that is.'
Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It was always
difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anything large and
impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was automatically
claimed as having been built since the Revolution, while anything that was
obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim period called the Middle
Ages. The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any
value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one
could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the
names of streets--anything that might throw light upon the past had been
systematically altered.
'I never knew it had been a church,' he said.
'There's a lot of them left, really,' said the old man, 'though they've
been put to other uses. Now, how did that rhyme go? Ah! I've got it!
"Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's----"
there, now, that's as far as I can get. A farthing, that was a small copper
coin, looked something like a cent.'
'Where was St Martin's?' said Winston.
'St Martin's? That's still standing. It's in Victory Square, alongside the
picture gallery. A building with a kind of a triangular porch and pillars
in front, and a big flight of steps.'
Winston knew the place well. It was a museum used for propaganda displays
of various kinds--scale models of rocket bombs and Floating Fortresses,
waxwork tableaux illustrating enemy atrocities, and the like.
'St Martin's-in-the-Fields it used to be called,' supplemented the old man,
'though I don't recollect any fields anywhere in those parts.'
Winston did not buy the picture. It would have been an even more
incongruous possession than the glass paperweight, and impossible to carry
home, unless it were taken out of its frame. But he lingered for some
minutes more, talking to the old man, whose name, he discovered, was not
Weeks--as one might have gathered from the inscription over the
shop-front--but Charrington. Mr Charrington, it seemed, was a widower aged
sixty-three and had inhabited this shop for thirty years. Throughout that
time he had been intending to alter the name over the window, but had never
quite got to the point of doing it. All the while that they were talking
the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston's head. Oranges and
lemons say the bells of St Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say
the bells of St Martin's! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself
you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London
that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one
ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so
far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells
ringing.
He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as not
to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out of
the door. He had already made up his mind that after a suitable
interval--a month, say--he would take the risk of visiting the shop again.
It was perhaps not more dangerous than shirking an evening at the Centre.
The serious piece of folly had been to come back here in the first place,
after buying the diary and without knowing whether the proprietor of the
shop could be trusted. However----!
Yes, he thought again, he would come back. He would buy further scraps of
beautiful rubbish. He would buy the engraving of St Clement Danes, take
it out of its frame, and carry it home concealed under the jacket of his
overalls. He would drag the rest of that poem out of Mr Charrington's
memory. Even the lunatic project of renting the room upstairs flashed
momentarily through his mind again. For perhaps five seconds exaltation
made him careless, and he stepped out on to the pavement without so much
as a preliminary glance through the window. He had even started humming
to an improvised tune
Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the----
Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water. A figure
in blue overalls was coming down the pavement, not ten metres away. It was
the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair. The light
was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her. She looked
him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not
seen him.
For a few seconds Winston was too paralysed to move. Then he turned to the
right and walked heavily away, not noticing for the moment that he was
going in the wrong direction. At any rate, one question was settled. There
was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him. She must have
followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she
should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure
backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived.
It was too great a coincidence. Whether she was really an agent of the
Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly
mattered. It was enough that she was watching him. Probably she had seen
him go into the pub as well.
It was an effort to walk. The lump of glass in his pocket banged against
his thigh at each step, and he was half minded to take it out and throw it
away. The worst thing was the pain in his belly. For a couple of minutes
he had the feeling that he would die if he did not reach a lavatory soon.
But there would be no public lavatories in a quarter like this. Then the
spasm passed, leaving a dull ache behind.
The street was a blind alley. Winston halted, stood for several seconds
wondering vaguely what to do, then turned round and began to retrace his
steps. As he turned it occurred to him that the girl had only passed him
three minutes ago and that by running he could probably catch up with her.
He could keep on her track till they were in some quiet place, and then
smash her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of glass in his pocket
would be heavy enough for the job. But he abandoned the idea immediately,
because even the thought of making any physical effort was unbearable. He
could not run, he could not strike a blow. Besides, she was young and lusty
and would defend herself. He thought also of hurrying to the Community
Centre and staying there till the place closed, so as to establish a
partial alibi for the evening. But that too was impossible. A deadly
lassitude had taken hold of him. All he wanted was to get home quickly and
then sit down and be quiet.
It was after twenty-two hours when he got back to the flat. The lights
would be switched off at the main at twenty-three thirty. He went into the
kitchen and swallowed nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin. Then he went to
the table in the alcove, sat down, and took the diary out of the drawer.
But he did not open it at once. From the telescreen a brassy female voice
was squalling a patriotic song. He sat staring at the marbled cover of the
book, trying without success to shut the voice out of his consciousness.
It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing
was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so.
Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But it needed desperate
courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and
certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of
astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery
of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment
when a special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-haired
girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the
extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that
in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but
always against one's own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull
ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same,
he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the
battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that
you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until
it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or
screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or
cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
He opened the diary. It was important to write something down. The woman
on the telescreen had started a new song. Her voice seemed to stick into
his brain like jagged splinters of glass. He tried to think of O'Brien,
for whom, or to whom, the diary was written, but instead he began thinking
of the things that would happen to him after the Thought Police took him
away. It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed was
what you expected. But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet
everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to
be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the
crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair.
Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Why was
it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever
escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess. When once you had
succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be
dead. Why then did that horror, which altered nothing, have to lie embedded
in future time?
He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of
O'Brien. 'We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,' O'Brien
had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where
there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see,
but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. But with the
voice from the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not follow the train
of thought further. He put a cigarette in his mouth. Half the tobacco
promptly fell out on to his tongue, a bitter dust which was difficult to
spit out again. The face of Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that
of O'Brien. Just as he had done a few days earlier, he slid a coin out of
his pocket and looked at it. The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm,
protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache?
Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
PART TWO
Chapter 1
It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left the cubicle to go
to the lavatory.
A solitary figure was coming towards him from the other end of the long,
brightly-lit corridor. It was the girl with dark hair. Four days had gone
past since the evening when he had run into her outside the junk-shop.
As she came nearer he saw that her right arm was in a sling, not noticeable
at a distance because it was of the same colour as her overalls. Probably
she had crushed her hand while swinging round one of the big kaleidoscopes
on which the plots of novels were 'roughed in'. It was a common accident
in the Fiction Department.
They were perhaps four metres apart when the girl stumbled and fell almost
flat on her face. A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her. She must have
fallen right on the injured arm. Winston stopped short. The girl had risen
to her knees. Her face had turned a milky yellow colour against which her
mouth stood out redder than ever. Her eyes were fixed on his, with an
appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.
A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart. In front of him was an enemy
who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature,
in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively
started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on
the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.
'You're hurt?' he said.
'It's nothing. My arm. It'll be all right in a second.'
She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had certainly turned
very pale.
'You haven't broken anything?'
'No, I'm all right. It hurt for a moment, that's all.'
She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up. She had regained
some of her colour, and appeared very much better.
'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly. 'I only gave my wrist a bit of a
bang. Thanks, comrade!'
And with that she walked on in the direction in which she had been going,
as briskly as though it had really been nothing. The whole incident could
not have taken as much as half a minute. Not to let one's feelings appear
in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct,
and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen
when the thing happened. Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to
betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was
helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand. There was no
question that she had done it intentionally. It was something small and
flat. As he passed through the lavatory door he transferred it to his
pocket and felt it with the tips of his fingers. It was a scrap of paper
folded into a square.
While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to
get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on
it. For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets
and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew.
There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens
were watched continuously.
He went back to his cubicle, sat down, threw the fragment of paper
casually among the other papers on the desk, put on his spectacles and
hitched the speakwrite towards him. 'Five minutes,' he told himself,
'five minutes at the very least!' His heart bumped in his breast with
frightening loudness. Fortunately the piece of work he was engaged on was
mere routine, the rectification of a long list of figures, not needing
close attention.
Whatever was written on the paper, it must have some kind of political
meaning. So far as he could see there were two possibilities. One, much
the more likely, was that the girl was an agent of the Thought Police,
just as he had feared. He did not know why the Thought Police should
choose to deliver their messages in such a fashion, but perhaps they had
their reasons. The thing that was written on the paper might be a threat, a
summons, an order to commit suicide, a trap of some description. But there
was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he
tried vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from
the Thought Police at all, but from some kind of underground organization.
Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the girl was part of it!
No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very
instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his hand. It was not till a couple
of minutes later that the other, more probable explanation had occurred to
him. And even now, though his intellect told him that the message probably
meant death--still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable
hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with difficulty that he
kept his voice from trembling as he murmured his figures into the
speakwrite.
He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatic
tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He re-adjusted his spectacles on his nose,
sighed, and drew the next batch of work towards him, with the scrap of
paper on top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large
unformed handwriting:
I LOVE YOU.
For several seconds he was too stunned even to throw the incriminating
thing into the memory hole. When he did so, although he knew very well the
danger of showing too much interest, he could not resist reading it once
again, just to make sure that the words were really there.
For the rest of the morning it was very difficult to work. What was even
worse than having to focus his mind on a series of niggling jobs was the
need to conceal his agitation from the telescreen. He felt as though a
fire were burning in his belly. Lunch in the hot, crowded, noise-filled
canteen was torment. He had hoped to be alone for a little while during
the lunch hour, but as bad luck would have it the imbecile Parsons flopped
down beside him, the tang of his sweat almost defeating the tinny smell of
stew, and kept up a stream of talk about the preparations for Hate Week.
He was particularly enthusiastic about a papier-mache model of Big
Brother's head, two metres wide, which was being made for the occasion by
his daughter's troop of Spies. The irritating thing was that in the racket
of voices Winston could hardly hear what Parsons was saying, and was
constantly having to ask for some fatuous remark to be repeated. Just once
he caught a glimpse of the girl, at a table with two other girls at the
far end of the room. She appeared not to have seen him, and he did not
look in that direction again.
The afternoon was more bearable. Immediately after lunch there arrived a
delicate, difficult piece of work which would take several hours and
necessitated putting everything else aside. It consisted in falsifying a
series of production reports of two years ago, in such a way as to cast
discredit on a prominent member of the Inner Party, who was now under a
cloud. This was the kind of thing that Winston was good at, and for more
than two hours he succeeded in shutting the girl out of his mind
altogether. Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging,
intolerable desire to be alone. Until he could be alone it was impossible
to think this new development out. Tonight was one of his nights at the
Community Centre. He wolfed another tasteless meal in the canteen, hurried
off to the Centre, took part in the solemn foolery of a 'discussion group',
played two games of table tennis, swallowed several glasses of gin, and
sat for half an hour through a lecture entitled 'Ingsoc in relation to
chess'. His soul writhed with boredom, but for once he had had no impulse
to shirk his evening at the Centre. At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU
the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor
risks suddenly seemed stupid. It was not till twenty-three hours, when he
was home and in bed--in the darkness, where you were safe even from the
telescreen so long as you kept silent--that he was able to think
continuously.
It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with
the girl and arrange a meeting. He did not consider any longer the
possibility that she might be laying some kind of trap for him. He knew
that it was not so, because of her unmistakable agitation when she handed
him the note. Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, as well
she might be. Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross his
mind. Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with
a cobblestone, but that was of no importance. He thought of her naked,
youthful body, as he had seen it in his dream. He had imagined her a fool
like all the rest of them, her head stuffed with lies and hatred, her
belly full of ice. A kind of fever seized him at the thought that he might
lose her, the white youthful body might slip away from him! What he feared
more than anything else was that she would simply change her mind if he
did not get in touch with her quickly. But the physical difficulty of
meeting was enormous. It was like trying to make a move at chess when you
were already mated. Whichever way you turned, the telescreen faced you.
Actually, all the possible ways of communicating with her had occurred to
him within five minutes of reading the note; but now, with time to think,
he went over them one by one, as though laying out a row of instruments
on a table.
Obviously the kind of encounter that had happened this morning could not
be repeated. If she had worked in the Records Department it might have
been comparatively simple, but he had only a very dim idea whereabouts in
the building the Fiction Department lay, and he had no pretext for going
there. If he had known where she lived, and at what time she left work,
he could have contrived to meet her somewhere on her way home; but to try
to follow her home was not safe, because it would mean loitering about
outside the Ministry, which was bound to be noticed. As for sending a
letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By a routine that
was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit. Actually, few
people ever wrote letters. For the messages that it was occasionally
necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases,
and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable. In any case he did not
know the girl's name, let alone her address. Finally he decided that the
safest place was the canteen. If he could get her at a table by herself,
somewhere in the middle of the room, not too near the telescreens, and
with a sufficient buzz of conversation all round--if these conditions
endured for, say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange a few
words.
For a week after this, life was like a restless dream. On the next day she
did not appear in the canteen until he was leaving it, the whistle having
already blown. Presumably she had been changed on to a later shift. They
passed each other without a glance. On the day after that she was in the
canteen at the usual time, but with three other girls and immediately
under a telescreen. Then for three dreadful days she did not appear at
all. His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable
sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every
sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an
agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape from her image. He did
not touch the diary during those days. If there was any relief, it was in
his work, in which he could sometimes forget himself for ten minutes at a
stretch. He had absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her. There
was no enquiry he could make. She might have been vaporized, she might
have committed suicide, she might have been transferred to the other end
of Oceania: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her
mind and decided to avoid him.
The next day she reappeared. Her arm was out of the sling and she had a
band of sticking-plaster round her wrist. The relief of seeing her was
so great that he could not resist staring directly at her for several
seconds. On the following day he very nearly succeeded in speaking to her.
When he came into the canteen she was sitting at a table well out from the
wall, and was quite alone. It was early, and the place was not very full.
The queue edged forward till Winston was almost at the counter, then was
held up for two minutes because someone in front was complaining that he
had not received his tablet of saccharine. But the girl was still alone
when Winston secured his tray and began to make for her table. He walked
casually towards her, his eyes searching for a place at some table beyond
her. She was perhaps three metres away from him. Another two seconds would
do it. Then a voice behind him called, 'Smith!' He pretended not to hear.
'Smith!' repeated the voice, more loudly. It was no use. He turned round.
A blond-headed, silly-faced young man named Wilsher, whom he barely knew,
was inviting him with a smile to a vacant place at his table. It was not
safe to refuse. After having been recognized, he could not go and sit at
a table with an unattended girl. It was too noticeable. He sat down with
a friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston had a
hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it.
The girl's table filled up a few minutes later.
But she must have seen him coming towards her, and perhaps she would take
the hint. Next day he took care to arrive early. Surely enough, she was at
a table in about the same place, and again alone. The person immediately
ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like man
with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes. As Winston turned away from
the counter with his tray, he saw that the little man was making straight
for the girl's table. His hopes sank again. There was a vacant place at a
table further away, but something in the little man's appearance suggested
that he would be sufficiently attentive to his own comfort to choose the
emptiest table. With ice at his heart Winston followed. It was no use
unless he could get the girl alone. At this moment there was a tremendous
crash. The little man was sprawling on all fours, his tray had gone flying,
two streams of soup and coffee were flowing across the floor. He started
to his feet with a malignant glance at Winston, whom he evidently
suspected of having tripped him up. But it was all right. Five seconds
later, with a thundering heart, Winston was sitting at the girl's table.
He did not look at her. He unpacked his tray and promptly began eating.
It was all-important to speak at once, before anyone else came, but now
a terrible fear had taken possession of him. A week had gone by since
she had first approached him. She would have changed her mind, she must
have changed her mind! It was impossible that this affair should end
successfully; such things did not happen in real life. He might have
flinched altogether from speaking if at this moment he had not seen
Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply round the room with
a tray, looking for a place to sit down. In his vague way Ampleforth
was attached to Winston, and would certainly sit down at his table if
he caught sight of him. There was perhaps a minute in which to act. Both
Winston and the girl were eating steadily. The stuff they were eating was
a thin stew, actually a soup, of haricot beans. In a low murmur Winston
began speaking. Neither of them looked up; steadily they spooned the
watery stuff into their mouths, and between spoonfuls exchanged the few
necessary words in low expressionless voices.
'What time do you leave work?'
'Eighteen-thirty.'
'Where can we meet?'
'Victory Square, near the monument.'
'It's full of telescreens.'
'It doesn't matter if there's a crowd.'
'Any signal?'
'No. Don't come up to me until you see me among a lot of people. And don't
look at me. Just keep somewhere near me.'
'What time?'
'Nineteen hours.'
'All right.'
Ampleforth failed to see Winston and sat down at another table. They did
not speak again, and, so far as it was possible for two people sitting on
opposite sides of the same table, they did not look at one another. The
girl finished her lunch quickly and made off, while Winston stayed to
smoke a cigarette.
Winston was in Victory Square before the appointed time. He wandered round
the base of the enormous fluted column, at the top of which Big Brother's
statue gazed southward towards the skies where he had vanquished the
Eurasian aeroplanes (the Eastasian aeroplanes, it had been, a few years
ago) in the Battle of Airstrip One. In the street in front of it there was
a statue of a man on horseback which was supposed to represent Oliver
Cromwell. At five minutes past the hour the girl had still not appeared.
Again the terrible fear seized upon Winston. She was not coming, she had
changed her mind! He walked slowly up to the north side of the square and
got a sort of pale-coloured pleasure from identifying St Martin's Church,
whose bells, when it had bells, had chimed 'You owe me three farthings.'
Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or
pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column. It was not
safe to go near her until some more people had accumulated. There were
telescreens all round the pediment. But at this moment there was a din of
shouting and a zoom of heavy vehicles from somewhere to the left. Suddenly
everyone seemed to be running across the square. The girl nipped nimbly
round the lions at the base of the monument and joined in the rush.
Winston followed. As he ran, he gathered from some shouted remarks that
a convoy of Eurasian prisoners was passing.
Already a dense mass of people was blocking the south side of the square.
Winston, at normal times the kind of person who gravitates to the outer
edge of any kind of scrimmage, shoved, butted, squirmed his way forward
into the heart of the crowd. Soon he was within arm's length of the girl,
but the way was blocked by an enormous prole and an almost equally enormous
woman, presumably his wife, who seemed to form an impenetrable wall of
flesh. Winston wriggled himself sideways, and with a violent lunge managed
to drive his shoulder between them. For a moment it felt as though his
entrails were being ground to pulp between the two muscular hips, then he
had broken through, sweating a little. He was next to the girl. They were
shoulder to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them.
A long line of trucks, with wooden-faced guards armed with sub-machine
guns standing upright in each corner, was passing slowly down the street.
In the trucks little yellow men in shabby greenish uniforms were squatting,
jammed close together. Their sad, Mongolian faces gazed out over the sides
of the trucks utterly incurious. Occasionally when a truck jolted there
was a clank-clank of metal: all the prisoners were wearing leg-irons.
Truck-load after truck-load of the sad faces passed. Winston knew they
were there but he saw them only intermittently. The girl's shoulder, and
her arm right down to the elbow, were pressed against his. Her cheek was
almost near enough for him to feel its warmth. She had immediately taken
charge of the situation, just as she had done in the canteen. She began
speaking in the same expressionless voice as before, with lips barely
moving, a mere murmur easily drowned by the din of voices and the rumbling
of the trucks.
'Can you hear me?'
'Yes.'
'Can you get Sunday afternoon off?'
'Yes.'
'Then listen carefully. You'll have to remember this. Go to Paddington
Station----'
With a sort of military precision that astonished him, she outlined the
route that he was to follow. A half-hour railway journey; turn left outside
the station; two kilometres along the road; a gate with the top bar
missing; a path across a field; a grass-grown lane; a track between bushes;
a dead tree with moss on it. It was as though she had a map inside her
head. 'Can you remember all that?' she murmured finally.
'Yes.'
'You turn left, then right, then left again. And the gate's got no top bar.'
'Yes. What time?'
'About fifteen. You may have to wait. I'll get there by another way. Are
you sure you remember everything?'
'Yes.'
'Then get away from me as quick as you can.'
She need not have told him that. But for the moment they could not
extricate themselves from the crowd. The trucks were still filing past,
the people still insatiably gaping. At the start there had been a few boos
and hisses, but it came only from the Party members among the crowd, and
had soon stopped. The prevailing emotion was simply curiosity. Foreigners,
whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One
literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as
prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did
one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as
war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour
camps. The round Mogol faces had given way to faces of a more European
type, dirty, bearded and exhausted. From over scrubby cheekbones eyes
looked into Winston's, sometimes with strange intensity, and flashed away
again. The convoy was drawing to an end. In the last truck he could see an
aged man, his face a mass of grizzled hair, standing upright with wrists
crossed in front of him, as though he were used to having them bound
together. It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the
last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his
and gave it a fleeting squeeze.
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that
their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail
of her hand. He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the
work-hardened palm with its row of callouses, the smooth flesh under the
wrist. Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the
same instant it occurred to him that he did not know what colour the
girl's eyes were. They were probably brown, but people with dark hair
sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her would have
been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among
the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead
of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully
at Winston out of nests of hair.
Chapter 2
Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled light and shade,
stepping out into pools of gold wherever the boughs parted. Under the
trees to the left of him the ground was misty with bluebells. The air
seemed to kiss one's skin. It was the second of May. From somewhere deeper
in the heart of the wood came the droning of ring-doves.
He was a bit early. There had been no difficulties about the journey, and
the girl was so evidently experienced that he was less frightened than he
would normally have been. Presumably she could be trusted to find a safe
place. In general you could not assume that you were much safer in the
country than in London. There were no telescreens, of course, but there
was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might
be picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey
by yourself without attracting attention. For distances of less than
100 kilometres it was not necessary to get your passport endorsed, but
sometimes there were patrols hanging about the railway stations, who
examined the papers of any Party member they found there and asked awkward
questions. However, no patrols had appeared, and on the walk from the
station he had made sure by cautious backward glances that he was not
being followed. The train was full of proles, in holiday mood because of
the summery weather. The wooden-seated carriage in which he travelled was
filled to overflowing by a single enormous family, ranging from a toothless
great-grandmother to a month-old baby, going out to spend an afternoon
with 'in-laws' in the country, and, as they freely explained to Winston,
to get hold of a little black-market butter.
The lane widened, and in a minute he came to the footpath she had told him
of, a mere cattle-track which plunged between the bushes. He had no watch,
but it could not be fifteen yet. The bluebells were so thick underfoot
that it was impossible not to tread on them. He knelt down and began
picking some partly to pass the time away, but also from a vague idea that
he would like to have a bunch of flowers to offer to the girl when they
met. He had got together a big bunch and was smelling their faint sickly
scent when a sound at his back froze him, the unmistakable crackle of a
foot on twigs. He went on picking bluebells. It was the best thing to do.
It might be the girl, or he might have been followed after all. To look
round was to show guilt. He picked another and another. A hand fell
lightly on his shoulder.
He looked up. It was the girl. She shook her head, evidently as a warning
that he must keep silent, then parted the bushes and quickly led the way
along the narrow track into the wood. Obviously she had been that way
before, for she dodged the boggy bits as though by habit. Winston followed,
still clasping his bunch of flowers. His first feeling was relief, but as
he watched the strong slender body moving in front of him, with the scarlet
sash that was just tight enough to bring out the curve of her hips, the
sense of his own inferiority was heavy upon him. Even now it seemed quite
likely that when she turned round and looked at him she would draw back
after all. The sweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves daunted
him. Already on the walk from the station the May sunshine had made him
feel dirty and etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of
London in the pores of his skin. It occurred to him that till now she had
probably never seen him in broad daylight in the open. They came to the
fallen tree that she had spoken of. The girl hopped over and forced apart
the bushes, in which there did not seem to be an opening. When Winston
followed her, he found that they were in a natural clearing, a tiny grassy
knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely. The girl
stopped and turned.
'Here we are,' she said.
He was facing her at several paces' distance. As yet he did not dare move
nearer to her.
'I didn't want to say anything in the lane,' she went on, 'in case there's
a mike hidden there. I don't suppose there is, but there could be. There's
always the chance of one of those swine recognizing your voice. We're all
right here.'
He still had not the courage to approach her. 'We're all right here?'
he repeated stupidly.
'Yes. Look at the trees.' They were small ashes, which at some time had
been cut down and had sprouted up again into a forest of poles, none of
them thicker than one's wrist. 'There's nothing big enough to hide a mike
in. Besides, I've been here before.'
They were only making conversation. He had managed to move closer to her
now. She stood before him very upright, with a smile on her face that
looked faintly ironical, as though she were wondering why he was so slow
to act. The bluebells had cascaded on to the ground. They seemed to have
fallen of their own accord. He took her hand.
'Would you believe,' he said, 'that till this moment I didn't know what
colour your eyes were?' They were brown, he noted, a rather light shade of
brown, with dark lashes. 'Now that you've seen what I'm really like,
can you still bear to look at me?'
'Yes, easily.'
'I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that I can't get rid of. I've
got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth.'
'I couldn't care less,' said the girl.
The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was in his arms.
At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. The youthful
body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against his
face, and yes! actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the
wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was calling
him darling, precious one, loved one. He had pulled her down on to the
ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her.
But the truth was that he had no physical sensation, except that of mere
contact. All he felt was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was
happening, but he had no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and
prettiness had frightened him, he was too much used to living without
women--he did not know the reason. The girl picked herself up and pulled a
bluebell out of her hair. She sat against him, putting her arm round his
waist.
'Never mind, dear. There's no hurry. We've got the whole afternoon. Isn't
this a splendid hide-out? I found it when I got lost once on a community
hike. If anyone was coming you could hear them a hundred metres away.'
'What is your name?' said Winston.
'Julia. I know yours. It's Winston--Winston Smith.'
'How did you find that out?'
'I expect I'm better at finding things out than you are, dear. Tell me,
what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?'
He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of
love-offering to start off by telling the worst.
'I hated the sight of you,' he said. 'I wanted to rape you and then murder
you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in
with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imagined that you had
something to do with the Thought Police.'
The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a
tribute to the excellence of her disguise.
'Not the Thought Police! You didn't honestly think that?'
'Well, perhaps not exactly that. But from your general appearance--merely
because you're young and fresh and healthy, you understand--I thought that
probably----'
'You thought I was a good Party member. Pure in word and deed. Banners,
processions, slogans, games, community hikes all that stuff. And you
thought that if I had a quarter of a chance I'd denounce you as a
thought-criminal and get you killed off?'
'Yes, something of that kind. A great many young girls are like that,
you know.'
'It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said, ripping off the scarlet
sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to a bough. Then,
as though touching her waist had reminded her of something, she felt in
the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate. She
broke it in half and gave one of the pieces to Winston. Even before he had
taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate. It was
dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper. Chocolate normally was
dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it,
like the smoke of a rubbish fire. But at some time or another he had tasted
chocolate like the piece she had given him. The first whiff of its scent
had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was
powerful and troubling.
'Where did you get this stuff?' he said.
'Black market,' she said indifferently. 'Actually I am that sort of girl,
to look at. I'm good at games. I was a troop-leader in the Spies. I do
voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours
and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always
carry one end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and
I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say.
It's the only way to be safe.'
The first fragment of chocolate had melted on Winston's tongue. The taste
was delightful. But there was still that memory moving round the edges of
his consciousness, something strongly felt but not reducible to definite
shape, like an object seen out of the corner of one's eye. He pushed it
away from him, aware only that it was the memory of some action which he
would have liked to undo but could not.
'You are very young,' he said. 'You are ten or fifteen years younger than
I am. What could you see to attract you in a man like me?'
'It was something in your face. I thought I'd take a chance. I'm good at
spotting people who don't belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were
against THEM.'
THEM, it appeared, meant the Party, and above all the Inner Party, about
whom she talked with an open jeering hatred which made Winston feel uneasy,
although he knew that they were safe here if they could be safe anywhere.
A thing that astonished him about her was the coarseness of her language.
Party members were supposed not to swear, and Winston himself very seldom
did swear, aloud, at any rate. Julia, however, seemed unable to mention
the Party, and especially the Inner Party, without using the kind of words
that you saw chalked up in dripping alley-ways. He did not dislike it. It
was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways,
and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that
smells bad hay. They had left the clearing and were wandering again
through the chequered shade, with their arms round each other's waists
whenever it was wide enough to walk two abreast. He noticed how much
softer her waist seemed to feel now that the sash was gone. They did not
speak above a whisper. Outside the clearing, Julia said, it was better to
go quietly. Presently they had reached the edge of the little wood. She
stopped him.
'Don't go out into the open. There might be someone watching. We're all
right if we keep behind the boughs.'
They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes. The sunlight, filtering
through innumerable leaves, was still hot on their faces. Winston looked
out into the field beyond, and underwent a curious, slow shock of
recognition. He knew it by sight. An old, close-bitten pasture, with a
footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged
hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just
perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in dense
masses like women's hair. Surely somewhere nearby, but out of sight,
there must be a stream with green pools where dace were swimming?
'Isn't there a stream somewhere near here?' he whispered.
'That's right, there is a stream. It's at the edge of the next field,
actually. There are fish in it, great big ones. You can watch them lying
in the pools under the willow trees, waving their tails.'
'It's the Golden Country--almost,' he murmured.
'The Golden Country?'
'It's nothing, really. A landscape I've seen sometimes in a dream.'
'Look!' whispered Julia.
A thrush had alighted on a bough not five metres away, almost at the level
of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in
the shade. It spread out its wings, fitted them carefully into place
again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance
to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the
afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung
together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with
astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the
bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped
for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its
speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort
of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate,
no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood
and pour its music into nothingness? He wondered whether after all there
was a microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had spoken only in
low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would
pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small,
beetle-like man was listening intently--listening to that. But by degrees
the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as
though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got
mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped
thinking and merely felt. The girl's waist in the bend of his arm was soft
and warm. He pulled her round so that they were breast to breast; her body
seemed to melt into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as
water. Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard
kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved their faces apart again
both of them sighed deeply. The bird took fright and fled with a clatter
of wings.
Winston put his lips against her ear. 'NOW,' he whispered.
'Not here,' she whispered back. 'Come back to the hide-out. It's safer.'
Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back
to the clearing. When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned
and faced him. They were both breathing fast, but the smile had reappeared
round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant,
then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was almost as in his
dream. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes
off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent
gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her body
gleamed white in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body;
his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile.
He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.
'Have you done this before?'
'Of course. Hundreds of times--well, scores of times, anyway.'
'With Party members?'
'Yes, always with Party members.'
'With members of the Inner Party?'
'Not with those swine, no. But there's plenty that WOULD if they got half
a chance. They're not so holy as they make out.'
His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been
hundreds--thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him
with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface,
its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing
iniquity. If he could have infected the whole lot of them with leprosy or
syphilis, how gladly he would have done so! Anything to rot, to weaken, to
undermine! He pulled her down so that they were kneeling face to face.
'Listen. The more men you've had, the more I love you. Do you understand
that?'
'Yes, perfectly.'
'I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere.
I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.'
'Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I'm corrupt to the bones.'
'You like doing this? I don't mean simply me: I mean the thing in itself?'
'I adore it.'
That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one
person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that
was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. He pressed her down
upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was no
difficulty. Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to
normal speed, and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart. The
sun seemed to have grown hotter. They were both sleepy. He reached out for
the discarded overalls and pulled them partly over her. Almost immediately
they fell asleep and slept for about half an hour.
Winston woke first. He sat up and watched the freckled face, still
peacefully asleep, pillowed on the palm of her hand. Except for her mouth,
you could not call her beautiful. There was a line or two round the eyes,
if you looked closely. The short dark hair was extraordinarily thick and
soft. It occurred to him that he still did not know her surname or where
she lived.
The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying,
protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under
the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back.
He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. In the
old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was
desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure
love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was
mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax
a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
Chapter 3
'We can come here once again,' said Julia. 'It's generally safe to use any
hide-out twice. But not for another month or two, of course.'
As soon as she woke up her demeanour had changed. She became alert and
business-like, put her clothes on, knotted the scarlet sash about her
waist, and began arranging the details of the journey home. It seemed
natural to leave this to her. She obviously had a practical cunning which
Winston lacked, and she seemed also to have an exhaustive knowledge of the
countryside round London, stored away from innumerable community hikes.
The route she gave him was quite different from the one by which he had
come, and brought him out at a different railway station. 'Never go home
the same way as you went out,' she said, as though enunciating an important
general principle. She would leave first, and Winston was to wait half an
hour before following her.
She had named a place where they could meet after work, four evenings
hence. It was a street in one of the poorer quarters, where there was an
open market which was generally crowded and noisy. She would be hanging
about among the stalls, pretending to be in search of shoelaces or
sewing-thread. If she judged that the coast was clear she would blow
her nose when he approached; otherwise he was to walk past her without
recognition. But with luck, in the middle of the crowd, it would be
safe to talk for a quarter of an hour and arrange another meeting.
'And now I must go,' she said as soon as he had mastered his instructions.
'I'm due back at nineteen-thirty. I've got to put in two hours for the
Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or something. Isn't it
bloody? Give me a brush-down, would you? Have I got any twigs in my hair?
Are you sure? Then good-bye, my love, good-bye!'
She flung herself into his arms, kissed him almost violently, and a moment
later pushed her way through the saplings and disappeared into the wood
with very little noise. Even now he had not found out her surname or her
address. However, it made no difference, for it was inconceivable that
they could ever meet indoors or exchange any kind of written communication.
As it happened, they never went back to the clearing in the wood. During
the month of May there was only one further occasion on which they actually
succeeded in making love. That was in another hiding-place known to Julia,
the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country
where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good
hiding-place when once you got there, but the getting there was very
dangerous. For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different
place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. In the
street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted
down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one
another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked
on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence
by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then
taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly
cut short as they parted at the agreed spot, then continued almost without
introduction on the following day. Julia appeared to be quite used to this
kind of conversation, which she called 'talking by instalments'. She was
also surprisingly adept at speaking without moving her lips. Just once in
almost a month of nightly meetings they managed to exchange a kiss. They
were passing in silence down a side-street (Julia would never speak when
they were away from the main streets) when there was a deafening roar, the
earth heaved, and the air darkened, and Winston found himself lying on his
side, bruised and terrified. A rocket bomb must have dropped quite near at
hand. Suddenly he became aware of Julia's face a few centimetres from his
own, deathly white, as white as chalk. Even her lips were white. She was
dead! He clasped her against him and found that he was kissing a live
warm face. But there was some powdery stuff that got in the way of his
lips. Both of their faces were thickly coated with plaster.
There were evenings when they reached their rendezvous and then had to
walk past one another without a sign, because a patrol had just come round
the corner or a helicopter was hovering overhead. Even if it had been
less dangerous, it would still have been difficult to find time to meet.
Winston's working week was sixty hours, Julia's was even longer, and
their free days varied according to the pressure of work and did not
often coincide. Julia, in any case, seldom had an evening completely free.
She spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and
demonstrations, distributing literature for the junior Anti-Sex League,
preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections for the savings
campaign, and such-like activities. It paid, she said, it was camouflage.
If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. She even induced
Winston to mortgage yet another of his evenings by enrolling himself for
the part-time munition work which was done voluntarily by zealous Party
members. So, one evening every week, Winston spent four hours of paralysing
boredom, screwing together small bits of metal which were probably parts
of bomb fuses, in a draughty, ill-lit workshop where the knocking of
hammers mingled drearily with the music of the telescreens.
When they met in the church tower the gaps in their fragmentary
conversation were filled up. It was a blazing afternoon. The air in the
little square chamber above the bells was hot and stagnant, and smelt
overpoweringly of pigeon dung. They sat talking for hours on the dusty,
twig-littered floor, one or other of them getting up from time to time to
cast a glance through the arrowslits and make sure that no one was coming.
Julia was twenty-six years old. She lived in a hostel with thirty other
girls ('Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!' she said
parenthetically), and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing
machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted
chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor.
She was 'not clever', but was fond of using her hands and felt at home
with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel,
from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the
final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the
finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were
just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
She had no memories of anything before the early sixties and the only
person she had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the
Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight. At
school she had been captain of the hockey team and had won the gymnastics
trophy two years running. She had been a troop-leader in the Spies and a
branch secretary in the Youth League before joining the Junior Anti-Sex
League. She had always borne an excellent character. She had even (an
infallible mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec,
the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap
pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House
by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for
a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like
'Spanking Stories' or 'One Night in a Girls' School', to be bought
furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they
were buying something illegal.
'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously.
'Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only have six plots,
but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes.
I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I'm not literary, dear--not even enough
for that.'
He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except the
heads of the departments, were girls. The theory was that men, whose sex
instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater
danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.
'They don't even like having married women there,' she added. Girls are
always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who isn't, anyway.
She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member
of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest. 'And a good job too,'
said Julia, 'otherwise they'd have had my name out of him when he
confessed.' Since then there had been various others. Life as she saw it
was quite simple. You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the Party,
wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could. She
seemed to think it just as natural that 'they' should want to rob you of
your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated
the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general
criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no
interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used Newspeak words
except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never heard of
the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of
organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure,
struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay
alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there
might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of
the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something
unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply
evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.
They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too remote
to be worth thinking about. No imaginable committee would ever sanction
such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston's wife, could somehow have been
got rid of. It was hopeless even as a daydream.
'What was she like, your wife?' said Julia.
'She was--do you know the Newspeak word GOODTHINKFUL? Meaning naturally
orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?'
'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.'
He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiously enough
she appeared to know the essential parts of it already. She described
to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of
Katharine's body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still
seemed to be pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her
arms were clasped tightly round him. With Julia he felt no difficulty in
talking about such things: Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be
a painful memory and became merely a distasteful one.
'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,' he said. He told
her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go
through on the same night every week. 'She hated it, but nothing would
make her stop doing it. She used to call it--but you'll never guess.'
'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.
'How did you know that?'
'I've been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the
over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years.
I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can never tell;
people are such hypocrites.'
She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back
to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was
capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner
meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex
instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control
and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more
important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable
because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way
she put it was:
'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy
and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that.
They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching
up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If
you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother
and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of
their bloody rot?'
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion
between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the
hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be
kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct
and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the
Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar
trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be
abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their
children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand,
were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them
and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension
of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be
surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.
Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would unquestionably
have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too
stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But what really recalled
her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which
had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began telling Julia of
something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another
sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.
It was three or four months after they were married. They had lost their
way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They had only lagged behind
the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and
presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk
quarry. It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the
bottom. There was nobody of whom they could ask the way. As soon as she
realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy. To be away
from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of
wrong-doing. She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start
searching in the other direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some
tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them.
One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently growing on
the same root. He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called
to Katharine to come and look at it.
'Look, Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump down near the bottom.
Do you see they're two different colours?'
She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for
a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was
pointing. He was standing a little behind her, and he put his hand on
her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how
completely alone they were. There was not a human creature anywhere, not a
leaf stirring, not even a bird awake. In a place like this the danger that
there would be a hidden microphone was very small, and even if there was a
microphone it would only pick up sounds. It was the hottest sleepiest hour
of the afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his
face. And the thought struck him...
'Why didn't you give her a good shove?' said Julia. 'I would have.'
'Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I'd been the same person then as
I am now. Or perhaps I would--I'm not certain.'
'Are you sorry you didn't?'
'Yes. On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.'
They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer
against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her
hair conquering the pigeon dung. She was very young, he thought, she
still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push
an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.
'Actually it would have made no difference,' he said.
'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?'
'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're
playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds,
that's all.'
He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always contradicted
him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law
of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized
that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would
catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed
that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could
live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She
did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the
only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from
the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself
as a corpse.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.
'Not physically. Six months, a year--five years, conceivably. I am afraid
of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am.
Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little
difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the
same thing.'
'Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't
you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand,
this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like THIS?'
She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him. He could feel
her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls. Her body seemed to be
pouring some of its youth and vigour into his.
'Yes, I like that,' he said.
'Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, we've got to fix
up about the next time we meet. We may as well go back to the place in
the wood. We've given it a good long rest. But you must get there by a
different way this time. I've got it all planned out. You take the
train--but look, I'll draw it out for you.'
And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust,
and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the floor.
Chapter 4
Winston looked round the shabby little room above Mr Charrington's shop.
Beside the window the enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and
a coverless bolster. The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was
ticking away on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the
glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out
of the half-darkness.
In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups,
provided by Mr Charrington. Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water
to boil. He had brought an envelope full of Victory Coffee and some
saccharine tablets. The clock's hands said seventeen-twenty: it was
nineteen-twenty really. She was coming at nineteen-thirty.
Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly.
Of all the crimes that a Party member could commit, this one was the least
possible to conceal. Actually the idea had first floated into his head in
the form of a vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored by the surface
of the gateleg table. As he had foreseen, Mr Charrington had made no
difficulty about letting the room. He was obviously glad of the few dollars
that it would bring him. Nor did he seem shocked or become offensively
knowing when it was made clear that Winston wanted the room for the purpose
of a love-affair. Instead he looked into the middle distance and spoke in
generalities, with so delicate an air as to give the impression that he
had become partly invisible. Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing.
Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally. And when
they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew
of it to keep his knowledge to himself. He even, seeming almost to fade
out of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries to the
house, one of them through the back yard, which gave on an alley.
Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the
protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky,
and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman
pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her
middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line,
pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as
babies' diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she
was singing in a powerful contralto:
It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless
similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of
the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any
human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.
But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an
almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of
her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street,
and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the
room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
Folly, folly, folly! he thought again. It was inconceivable that they could
frequent this place for more than a few weeks without being caught. But
the temptation of having a hiding-place that was truly their own, indoors
and near at hand, had been too much for both of them. For some time
after their visit to the church belfry it had been impossible to arrange
meetings. Working hours had been drastically increased in anticipation of
Hate Week. It was more than a month distant, but the enormous, complex
preparations that it entailed were throwing extra work on to everybody.
Finally both of them managed to secure a free afternoon on the same day.
They had agreed to go back to the clearing in the wood. On the evening
beforehand they met briefly in the street. As usual, Winston hardly looked
at Julia as they drifted towards one another in the crowd, but from the
short glance he gave her it seemed to him that she was paler than usual.
'It's all off,' she murmured as soon as she judged it safe to speak.
'Tomorrow, I mean.'
'What?'
'Tomorrow afternoon. I can't come.'
'Why not?'
'Oh, the usual reason. It's started early this time.'
For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that he had known
her the nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there
had been little true sensuality in it. Their first love-making had been
simply an act of the will. But after the second time it was different. The
smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed
to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a
physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he
had a right to. When she said that she could not come, he had the feeling
that she was cheating him. But just at this moment the crowd pressed
them together and their hands accidentally met. She gave the tips of his
fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection. It
struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment
must be a normal, recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such as he had
not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they
were a married couple of ten years' standing. He wished that he were
walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly
and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the
household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could
be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time
they met. It was not actually at that moment, but at some time on the
following day, that the idea of renting Mr Charrington's room had occurred
to him. When he suggested it to Julia she had agreed with unexpected
readiness. Both of them knew that it was lunacy. It was as though they were
intentionally stepping nearer to their graves. As he sat waiting on the
edge of the bed he thought again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love.
It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's
consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as
surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps
postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful
act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.
At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia burst into the
room. She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse brown canvas, such as he had
sometimes seen her carrying to and fro at the Ministry. He started forward
to take her in his arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly,
partly because she was still holding the tool-bag.
'Half a second,' she said. 'Just let me show you what I've brought. Did
you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee? I thought you would. You
can chuck it away again, because we shan't be needing it. Look here.'
She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners
and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it. Underneath were a number
of neat paper packets. The first packet that she passed to Winston had a
strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of
heavy, sand-like stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.
'It isn't sugar?' he said.
'Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here's a loaf of bread--proper
white bread, not our bloody stuff--and a little pot of jam. And here's a
tin of milk--but look! This is the one I'm really proud of. I had to wrap
a bit of sacking round it, because----'
But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up. The smell was
already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation
from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even
now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself
mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost
again.
'It's coffee,' he murmured, 'real coffee.'
'It's Inner Party coffee. There's a whole kilo here,' she said.
'How did you manage to get hold of all these things?'
'It's all Inner Party stuff. There's nothing those swine don't have,
nothing. But of course waiters and servants and people pinch things,
and--look, I got a little packet of tea as well.'
Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a corner of the packet.
'It's real tea. Not blackberry leaves.'
'There's been a lot of tea about lately. They've captured India, or
something,' she said vaguely. 'But listen, dear. I want you to turn your
back on me for three minutes. Go and sit on the other side of the bed.
Don't go too near the window. And don't turn round till I tell you.'
Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down in the yard
the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub and
the line. She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep
feeling:
They sye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!
She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated
upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of
happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly
content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes
inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers
and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never
heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even
have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to
oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation
level that they had anything to sing about.
'You can turn round now,' said Julia.
He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her. What he
had actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked. The
transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. She
had painted her face.
She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and bought
herself a complete set of make-up materials. Her lips were deeply reddened,
her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something
under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done, but
Winston's standards in such matters were not high. He had never before
seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The
improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of colour
in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above
all, far more feminine. Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added
to the effect. As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets
flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half-darkness of a basement
kitchen, and a woman's cavernous mouth. It was the very same scent that
she had used; but at the moment it did not seem to matter.
'Scent too!' he said.
'Yes, dear, scent too. And do you know what I'm going to do next? I'm
going to get hold of a real woman's frock from somewhere and wear it
instead of these bloody trousers. I'll wear silk stockings and high-heeled
shoes! In this room I'm going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.'
They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed. It
was the first time that he had stripped himself naked in her presence.
Until now he had been too much ashamed of his pale and meagre body, with
the varicose veins standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch
over his ankle. There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was
threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished
both of them. 'It's sure to be full of bugs, but who cares?' said Julia.
One never saw a double bed nowadays, except in the homes of the proles.
Winston had occasionally slept in one in his boyhood: Julia had never been
in one before, so far as she could remember.
Presently they fell asleep for a little while. When Winston woke up the
hands of the clock had crept round to nearly nine. He did not stir, because
Julia was sleeping with her head in the crook of his arm. Most of her
make-up had transferred itself to his own face or the bolster, but a light
stain of rouge still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone. A yellow ray
from the sinking sun fell across the foot of the bed and lighted up the
fireplace, where the water in the pan was boiling fast. Down in the yard
the woman had stopped singing, but the faint shouts of children floated in
from the street. He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had
been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer
evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose,
talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply
lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could
never have been a time when that seemed ordinary? Julia woke up, rubbed
her eyes, and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.
'Half that water's boiled away,' she said. 'I'll get up and make some
coffee in another moment. We've got an hour. What time do they cut the
lights off at your flats?'
'Twenty-three thirty.'
'It's twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in earlier than that,
because--Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!'
She suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor,
and sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly
as he had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during
the Two Minutes Hate.
'What was it?' he said in surprise.
'A rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting. There's a
hole down there. I gave him a good fright, anyway.'
'Rats!' murmured Winston. 'In this room!'
'They're all over the place,' said Julia indifferently as she lay down
again. 'We've even got them in the kitchen at the hostel. Some parts of
London are swarming with them. Did you know they attack children? Yes,
they do. In some of these streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for
two minutes. It's the great huge brown ones that do it. And the nasty
thing is that the brutes always----'
'DON'T GO ON!' said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut.
'Dearest! You've gone quite pale. What's the matter? Do they make you feel
sick?'
'Of all horrors in the world--a rat!'
She pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him, as though
to reassure him with the warmth of her body. He did not reopen his eyes
immediately. For several moments he had had the feeling of being back in a
nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life. It was
always very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness,
and on the other side of it there was something unendurable, something too
dreadful to be faced. In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of
self-deception, because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of
darkness. With a deadly effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own
brain, he could even have dragged the thing into the open. He always woke
up without discovering what it was: but somehow it was connected with what
Julia had been saying when he cut her short.
'I'm sorry,' he said, 'it's nothing. I don't like rats, that's all.'
'Don't worry, dear, we're not going to have the filthy brutes in here.
I'll stuff the hole with a bit of sacking before we go. And next time we
come here I'll bring some plaster and bung it up properly.'
Already the black instant of panic was half-forgotten. Feeling slightly
ashamed of himself, he sat up against the bedhead. Julia got out of bed,
pulled on her overalls, and made the coffee. The smell that rose from the
saucepan was so powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest
anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive. What was even
better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given to it by
the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after years of saccharine.
With one hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam in the other,
Julia wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the bookcase,
pointing out the best way of repairing the gateleg table, plumping herself
down in the ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and examining
the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant amusement. She brought
the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better
light. He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft,
rainwatery appearance of the glass.
'What is it, do you think?' said Julia.
'I don't think it's anything--I mean, I don't think it was ever put to any
use. That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history that
they've forgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago, if
one knew how to read it.'
'And that picture over there'--she nodded at the engraving on the opposite
wall--'would that be a hundred years old?'
'More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's impossible to discover
the age of anything nowadays.'
She went over to look at it. 'Here's where that brute stuck his nose out,'
she said, kicking the wainscoting immediately below the picture. 'What is
this place? I've seen it before somewhere.'
'It's a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement Danes its name was.'
The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught him came back into
his head, and he added half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons, say the
bells of St Clement's!"
To his astonishment she capped the line:
'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey----'
'I can't remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I remember it ends
up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop
off your head!"'
It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another
line after 'the bells of Old Bailey'. Perhaps it could be dug out of
Mr Charrington's memory, if he were suitably prompted.
'Who taught you that?' he said.
'My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was
vaporized when I was eight--at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a
lemon was,' she added inconsequently. 'I've seen oranges. They're a kind
of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.'
'I can remember lemons,' said Winston. 'They were quite common in the
fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell
them.'
'I bet that picture's got bugs behind it,' said Julia. 'I'll take it down
and give it a good clean some day. I suppose it's almost time we were
leaving. I must start washing this paint off. What a bore! I'll get the
lipstick off your face afterwards.'
Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room was darkening. He
turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight.
The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the
interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was
almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass
had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere
complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in
fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table,
and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The
paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his
own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
Chapter 5
Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few
thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody
mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the
Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried
a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had
been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before--nothing had
been crossed out--but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had
ceased to exist: he had never existed.
The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinthine Ministry the windowless,
air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature, but outside the
pavements scorched one's feet and the stench of the Tubes at the rush hours
was a horror. The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the
staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings,
military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen
programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies
built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs
faked. Julia's unit in the Fiction Department had been taken off the
production of novels and was rushing out a series of atrocity pamphlets.
Winston, in addition to his regular work, spent long periods every day in
going through back files of 'The Times' and altering and embellishing news
items which were to be quoted in speeches. Late at night, when crowds of
rowdy proles roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. The
rocket bombs crashed oftener than ever, and sometimes in the far distance
there were enormous explosions which no one could explain and about which
there were wild rumours.
The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song,
it was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged
on the telescreens. It had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly
be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by
hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The
proles had taken a fancy to it, and in the midnight streets it competed
with the still-popular 'It was only a hopeless fancy'. The Parsons children
played it at all hours of the night and day, unbearably, on a comb and a
piece of toilet paper. Winston's evenings were fuller than ever. Squads of
volunteers, organized by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week,
stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs, and
perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers.
Parsons boasted that Victory Mansions alone would display four hundred
metres of bunting. He was in his native element and as happy as a lark.
The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for reverting
to shorts and an open shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once,
pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along
with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what
seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat.
A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption,
and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three
or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face
and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever
angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the
foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been
plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the
portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about the war,
were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism.
As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been
killing larger numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded film
theatre in Stepney, burying several hundred victims among the ruins. The
whole population of the neighbourhood turned out for a long, trailing
funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting.
Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground
and several dozen children were blown to pieces. There were further angry
demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the
poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and
a number of shops were looted in the turmoil; then a rumour flew round
that spies were directing the rocket bombs by means of wireless waves, and
an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their
house set on fire and perished of suffocation.
In the room over Mr Charrington's shop, when they could get there, Julia
and Winston lay side by side on a stripped bed under the open window,
naked for the sake of coolness. The rat had never come back, but the bugs
had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or
clean, the room was paradise. As soon as they arrived they would sprinkle
everything with pepper bought on the black market, tear off their clothes,
and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that
the bugs had rallied and were massing for the counter-attack.
Four, five, six--seven times they met during the month of June. Winston
had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost
the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided,
leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of
coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased
to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the
telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a
secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that
they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time.
What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know
that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room
was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.
Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal. He usually
stopped to talk with Mr Charrington for a few minutes on his way upstairs.
The old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other
hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the
tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his
meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient
gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the opportunity to
talk. Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and
thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had
always vaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman.
With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or
that--a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a
pinchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby's hair--never
asking that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it. To
talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out musical-box.
He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of
forgotten rhymes. There was one about four and twenty blackbirds, and
another about a cow with a crumpled horn, and another about the death
of poor Cock Robin. 'It just occurred to me you might be interested,' he
would say with a deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new
fragment. But he could never recall more than a few lines of any one
rhyme.
Both of them knew--in a way, it was never out of their minds that what
was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of
impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would
cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul
grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five
minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion
not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in
this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was
difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary. It was as when
Winston had gazed into the heart of the paperweight, with the feeling that
it would be possible to get inside that glassy world, and that once inside
it time could be arrested. Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of
escape. Their luck would hold indefinitely, and they would carry on their
intrigue, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives. Or
Katharine would die, and by subtle manoeuvrings Winston and Julia would
succeed in getting married. Or they would commit suicide together. Or
they would disappear, alter themselves out of recognition, learn to speak
with proletarian accents, get jobs in a factory and live out their lives
undetected in a back-street. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In
reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable,
suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day
and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed
an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next
breath so long as there is air available.
Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the
Party, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if the
fabulous Brotherhood was a reality, there still remained the difficulty
of finding one's way into it. He told her of the strange intimacy that
existed, or seemed to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the
impulse he sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's presence, announce
that he was the enemy of the Party, and demand his help. Curiously enough,
this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was used to
judging people by their faces, and it seemed natural to her that Winston
should believe O'Brien to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash
of the eyes. Moreover she took it for granted that everyone, or nearly
everyone, secretly hated the Party and would break the rules if he thought
it safe to do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized
opposition existed or could exist. The tales about Goldstein and his
underground army, she said, were simply a lot of rubbish which the Party
had invented for its own purposes and which you had to pretend to believe
in. Times beyond number, at Party rallies and spontaneous demonstrations,
she had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of people whose
names she had never heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the
faintest belief. When public trials were happening she had taken her place
in the detachments from the Youth League who surrounded the courts from
morning to night, chanting at intervals 'Death to the traitors!' During
the Two Minutes Hate she always excelled all others in shouting insults
at Goldstein. Yet she had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and
what doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since the
Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the
fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an independent political movement was
outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible. It
would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel
against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of
violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.
In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible
to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention
the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her
opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on
London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to
keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally never occurred
to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during
the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out
laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they
in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept
the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and
falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having
learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own
schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the
helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later,
when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one
generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he
told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long
before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After
all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It was rather more
of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did
not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia
and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as
a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy
had changed. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she said
vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of aeroplanes dated
from long before her birth, but the switchover in the war had happened
only four years ago, well after she was grown up. He argued with her about
it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing
her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and
not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as
unimportant. 'Who cares?' she said impatiently. 'It's always one bloody
war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.'
Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent
forgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify
her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought
of lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had once held between
his fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first, indeed, she
failed to grasp the point of the story.
'Were they friends of yours?' she said.
'No, I never knew them. They were Inner Party members. Besides, they were
far older men than I was. They belonged to the old days, before the
Revolution. I barely knew them by sight.'
'Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all the
time, aren't they?'
He tried to make her understand. 'This was an exceptional case. It wasn't
just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past,
starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives
anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like
that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about
the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been
destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has
been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed,
every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and
minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless
present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the
past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even
when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence
ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know
with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in
that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence
after the event--years after it.'
'And what good was that?'
'It was no good, because I threw it away a few minutes later. But if the
same thing happened today, I should keep it.'
'Well, I wouldn't!' said Julia. 'I'm quite ready to take risks, but only
for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper. What could you
have done with it even if you had kept it?'
'Not much, perhaps. But it was evidence. It might have planted a few doubts
here and there, supposing that I'd dared to show it to anybody. I don't
imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine
little knots of resistance springing up here and there--small groups of
people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving
a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we
leave off.'
'I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm interested in US.'
'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.
She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight.
In the ramifications of party doctrine she had not the faintest interest.
Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the
mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use
Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid
any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so
why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo,
and that was all one needed. If he persisted in talking of such subjects,
she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those
people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position. Talking to her,
he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while
having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view
of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of
understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations
of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was
demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to
notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.
They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm,
because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass
undigested through the body of a bird.
Chapter 6
It had happened at last. The expected message had come. All his life, it
seemed to him, he had been waiting for this to happen.
He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry and he was almost
at the spot where Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he became
aware that someone larger than himself was walking just behind him. The
person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, evidently as a prelude to
speaking. Winston stopped abruptly and turned. It was O'Brien.
At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only impulse was
to run away. His heart bounded violently. He would have been incapable of
speaking. O'Brien, however, had continued forward in the same movement,
laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston's arm, so that the two of
them were walking side by side. He began speaking with the peculiar grave
courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members.
'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,' he said. 'I was
reading one of your Newspeak articles in 'The Times' the other day. You
take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?'
Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. 'Hardly scholarly,' he
said. 'I'm only an amateur. It's not my subject. I have never had anything
to do with the actual construction of the language.'
'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien. 'That is not only my own
opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of yours who is certainly an
expert. His name has slipped my memory for the moment.'
Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable that this
was anything other than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only dead,
he was abolished, an unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have
been mortally dangerous. O'Brien's remark must obviously have been intended
as a signal, a codeword. By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had
turned the two of them into accomplices. They had continued to stroll
slowly down the corridor, but now O'Brien halted. With the curious,
disarming friendliness that he always managed to put in to the gesture he
resettled his spectacles on his nose. Then he went on:
'What I had really intended to say was that in your article I noticed you
had used two words which have become obsolete. But they have only become
so very recently. Have you seen the tenth edition of the Newspeak
Dictionary?'
'No,' said Winston. 'I didn't think it had been issued yet. We are still
using the ninth in the Records Department.'
'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I believe. But a
few advance copies have been circulated. I have one myself. It might
interest you to look at it, perhaps?'
'Very much so,' said Winston, immediately seeing where this tended.
'Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The reduction in the
number of verbs--that is the point that will appeal to you, I think. Let
me see, shall I send a messenger to you with the dictionary? But I am
afraid I invariably forget anything of that kind. Perhaps you could pick
it up at my flat at some time that suited you? Wait. Let me give you my
address.'
They were standing in front of a telescreen. Somewhat absent-mindedly
O'Brien felt two of his pockets and then produced a small leather-covered
notebook and a gold ink-pencil. Immediately beneath the telescreen, in
such a position that anyone who was watching at the other end of the
instrument could read what he was writing, he scribbled an address, tore
out the page and handed it to Winston.
'I am usually at home in the evenings,' he said. 'If not, my servant will
give you the dictionary.'
He was gone, leaving Winston holding the scrap of paper, which this time
there was no need to conceal. Nevertheless he carefully memorized what was
written on it, and some hours later dropped it into the memory hole along
with a mass of other papers.
They had been talking to one another for a couple of minutes at the most.
There was only one meaning that the episode could possibly have. It had
been contrived as a way of letting Winston know O'Brien's address. This
was necessary, because except by direct enquiry it was never possible to
discover where anyone lived. There were no directories of any kind. 'If
you ever want to see me, this is where I can be found,' was what O'Brien
had been saying to him. Perhaps there would even be a message concealed
somewhere in the dictionary. But at any rate, one thing was certain. The
conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer
edges of it.
He knew that sooner or later he would obey O'Brien's summons. Perhaps
tomorrow, perhaps after a long delay--he was not certain. What was
happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years
ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second
had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words,
and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would
happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained
in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like
a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive. Even while he was
speaking to O'Brien, when the meaning of the words had sunk in, a chilly
shuddering feeling had taken possession of his body. He had the sensation
of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better
because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.
Chapter 7
Winston had woken up with his eyes full of tears. Julia rolled sleepily
against him, murmuring something that might have been 'What's the matter?'
'I dreamt--' he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put
into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected
with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.
He lay back with his eyes shut, still sodden in the atmosphere of the
dream. It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to
stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain.
It had all occurred inside the glass paperweight, but the surface of the
glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooded
with clear soft light in which one could see into interminable distances.
The dream had also been comprehended by--indeed, in some sense it had
consisted in--a gesture of the arm made by his mother, and made again
thirty years later by the Jewish woman he had seen on the news film,
trying to shelter the small boy from the bullets, before the helicopter
blew them both to pieces.
'Do you know,' he said, 'that until this moment I believed I had murdered
my mother?'
'Why did you murder her?' said Julia, almost asleep.
'I didn't murder her. Not physically.'
In the dream he had remembered his last glimpse of his mother, and within
a few moments of waking the cluster of small events surrounding it had all
come back. It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of
his consciousness over many years. He was not certain of the date, but he
could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had
happened.
His father had disappeared some time earlier, how much earlier he could
not remember. He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of
the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube
stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations
posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same
colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent
machine-gun fire in the distance--above all, the fact that there was
never enough to eat. He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys
in scrounging round dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of
cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust
from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting
for the passing of trucks which travelled over a certain route and were
known to carry cattle feed, and which, when they jolted over the bad
patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oil-cake.
When his father disappeared, his mother did not show any surprise or any
violent grief, but a sudden change came over her. She seemed to have
become completely spiritless. It was evident even to Winston that she was
waiting for something that she knew must happen. She did everything that
was needed--cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted
the mantelpiece--always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous
motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own accord. Her large
shapely body seemed to relapse naturally into stillness. For hours at a
time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister,
a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian
by thinness. Very occasionally she would take Winston in her arms and
press him against her for a long time without saying anything. He was
aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow
connected with the never-mentioned thing that was about to happen.
He remembered the room where they lived, a dark, close-smelling room that
seemed half filled by a bed with a white counterpane. There was a gas ring
in the fender, and a shelf where food was kept, and on the landing outside
there was a brown earthenware sink, common to several rooms. He remembered
his mother's statuesque body bending over the gas ring to stir at something
in a saucepan. Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the
fierce sordid battles at mealtimes. He would ask his mother naggingly,
over and over again, why there was not more food, he would shout and storm
at her (he even remembered the tones of his voice, which was beginning to
break prematurely and sometimes boomed in a peculiar way), or he would
attempt a snivelling note of pathos in his efforts to get more than his
share. His mother was quite ready to give him more than his share. She
took it for granted that he, 'the boy', should have the biggest portion;
but however much she gave him he invariably demanded more. At every meal
she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little
sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out
with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan
and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister's plate.
He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he
even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly
seemed to justify him. Between meals, if his mother did not stand guard,
he was constantly pilfering at the wretched store of food on the shelf.
One day a chocolate ration was issued. There had been no such issue for
weeks or months past. He remembered quite clearly that precious little
morsel of chocolate. It was a two-ounce slab (they still talked about
ounces in those days) between the three of them. It was obvious that it
ought to be divided into three equal parts. Suddenly, as though he were
listening to somebody else, Winston heard himself demanding in a loud
booming voice that he should be given the whole piece. His mother told him
not to be greedy. There was a long, nagging argument that went round and
round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings. His tiny
sister, clinging to her mother with both hands, exactly like a baby monkey,
sat looking over her shoulder at him with large, mournful eyes. In the
end his mother broke off three-quarters of the chocolate and gave it to
Winston, giving the other quarter to his sister. The little girl took hold
of it and looked at it dully, perhaps not knowing what it was. Winston
stood watching her for a moment. Then with a sudden swift spring he had
snatched the piece of chocolate out of his sister's hand and was fleeing
for the door.
'Winston, Winston!' his mother called after him. 'Come back! Give your
sister back her chocolate!'
He stopped, but did not come back. His mother's anxious eyes were fixed on
his face. Even now he was thinking about the thing, he did not know what
it was that was on the point of happening. His sister, conscious of having
been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her
arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in
the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He turned and fled down
the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.
He never saw his mother again. After he had devoured the chocolate he felt
somewhat ashamed of himself and hung about in the streets for several
hours, until hunger drove him home. When he came back his mother had
disappeared. This was already becoming normal at that time. Nothing was
gone from the room except his mother and his sister. They had not taken
any clothes, not even his mother's overcoat. To this day he did not know
with any certainty that his mother was dead. It was perfectly possible
that she had merely been sent to a forced-labour camp. As for his sister,
she might have been removed, like Winston himself, to one of the colonies
for homeless children (Reclamation Centres, they were called) which had
grown up as a result of the civil war, or she might have been sent to the
labour camp along with his mother, or simply left somewhere or other
to die.
The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping protecting
gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained. His
mind went back to another dream of two months ago. Exactly as his mother
had sat on the dingy white-quilted bed, with the child clinging to her, so
she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him, and drowning deeper
every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water.
He told Julia the story of his mother's disappearance. Without opening her
eyes she rolled over and settled herself into a more comfortable position.
'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days,' she said
indistinctly. 'All children are swine.'
'Yes. But the real point of the story----'
From her breathing it was evident that she was going off to sleep again.
He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not
suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual
woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of
nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed
were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered
from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is
ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved
him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When
the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in
her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more
chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed
natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered
the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets
than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to
persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while
at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When
once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel,
what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference.
Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever
heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And
yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed
all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They
were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What
mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture,
an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in
itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this
condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they
were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not
despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would
one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed
human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the
primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort.
And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few
weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked
it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.
'The proles are human beings,' he said aloud. 'We are not human.'
'Why not?' said Julia, who had woken up again.
He thought for a little while. 'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said,
'that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here
before it's too late, and never see each other again?'
'Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. But I'm not going to do
it, all the same.'
'We've been lucky,' he said 'but it can't last much longer. You're young.
You look normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people like me, you
might stay alive for another fifty years.'
'No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to do. And don't be
too downhearted. I'm rather good at staying alive.'
'We may be together for another six months--a year--there's no knowing.
At the end we're certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we
shall be? When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally
nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll
shoot you, and if I refuse to confess, they'll shoot you just the same.
Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off
your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will even know
whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without power of
any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one
another, although even that can't make the slightest difference.'
'If you mean confessing,' she said, 'we shall do that, right enough.
Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you.'
'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do
doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving
you--that would be the real betrayal.'
She thought it over. 'They can't do that,' she said finally. 'It's the one
thing they can't do. They can make you say anything--ANYTHING--but they
can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.'
'No,' he said a little more hopefully, 'no; that's quite true. They can't
get inside you. If you can FEEL that staying human is worth while, even
when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.'
He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy
upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit
them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of
finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was less
true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened
inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs,
delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual
wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning.
Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down
by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object
was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately
make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not
alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the
utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the
inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained
impregnable.
Chapter 8
They had done it, they had done it at last!
The room they were standing in was long-shaped and softly lit. The
telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the richness of the dark-blue carpet
gave one the impression of treading on velvet. At the far end of the room
O'Brien was sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of
papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up when the
servant showed Julia and Winston in.
Winston's heart was thumping so hard that he doubted whether he would be
able to speak. They had done it, they had done it at last, was all he
could think. It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly
to arrive together; though it was true that they had come by different
routes and only met on O'Brien's doorstep. But merely to walk into such a
place needed an effort of the nerve. It was only on very rare occasions
that one saw inside the dwelling-places of the Inner Party, or even
penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived. The whole
atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of
everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the
silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed
servants hurrying to and fro--everything was intimidating. Although he had
a good pretext for coming here, he was haunted at every step by the fear
that a black-uniformed guard would suddenly appear from round the corner,
demand his papers, and order him to get out. O'Brien's servant, however,
had admitted the two of them without demur. He was a small, dark-haired
man in a white jacket, with a diamond-shaped, completely expressionless
face which might have been that of a Chinese. The passage down which he
led them was softly carpeted, with cream-papered walls and white
wainscoting, all exquisitely clean. That too was intimidating. Winston
could not remember ever to have seen a passageway whose walls were not
grimy from the contact of human bodies.
O'Brien had a slip of paper between his fingers and seemed to be studying
it intently. His heavy face, bent down so that one could see the line of
the nose, looked both formidable and intelligent. For perhaps twenty
seconds he sat without stirring. Then he pulled the speakwrite towards
him and rapped out a message in the hybrid jargon of the Ministries:
'Items one comma five comma seven approved fullwise stop suggestion
contained item six doubleplus ridiculous verging crimethink cancel stop
unproceed constructionwise antegetting plusfull estimates machinery
overheads stop end message.'
He rose deliberately from his chair and came towards them across the
soundless carpet. A little of the official atmosphere seemed to have fallen
away from him with the Newspeak words, but his expression was grimmer than
usual, as though he were not pleased at being disturbed. The terror that
Winston already felt was suddenly shot through by a streak of ordinary
embarrassment. It seemed to him quite possible that he had simply made a
stupid mistake. For what evidence had he in reality that O'Brien was any
kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single
equivocal remark: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on
a dream. He could not even fall back on the pretence that he had come to
borrow the dictionary, because in that case Julia's presence was impossible
to explain. As O'Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike
him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was
a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst
of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his
tongue.
'You can turn it off!' he said.
'Yes,' said O'Brien, 'we can turn it off. We have that privilege.'
He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them,
and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting,
somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Even now it was
quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he
had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the telescreen
the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous. With
difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O'Brien's. Then
suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings
of a smile. With his characteristic gesture O'Brien resettled his
spectacles on his nose.
'Shall I say it, or will you?' he said.
'I will say it,' said Winston promptly. 'That thing is really turned off?'
'Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.'
'We have come here because----'
He paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of
his own motives. Since he did not in fact know what kind of
help he expected from O'Brien, it was not easy to say why he
had come here. He went on, conscious that what he was saying
must sound both feeble and pretentious:
'We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret
organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it.
We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. We
disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are
also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your
mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are
ready.'
He stopped and glanced over his shoulder, with the feeling that the door
had opened. Sure enough, the little yellow-faced servant had come in
without knocking. Winston saw that he was carrying a tray with a decanter
and glasses.
'Martin is one of us,' said O'Brien impassively. 'Bring the drinks over
here, Martin. Put them on the round table. Have we enough chairs? Then
we may as well sit down and talk in comfort. Bring a chair for yourself,
Martin. This is business. You can stop being a servant for the next ten
minutes.'
The little man sat down, quite at his ease, and yet still with a
servant-like air, the air of a valet enjoying a privilege. Winston
regarded him out of the corner of his eye. It struck him that the man's
whole life was playing a part, and that he felt it to be dangerous to
drop his assumed personality even for a moment. O'Brien took the decanter
by the neck and filled up the glasses with a dark-red liquid. It aroused
in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a
hoarding--a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move
up and down and pour its contents into a glass. Seen from the top the
stuff looked almost black, but in the decanter it gleamed like a ruby.
It had a sour-sweet smell. He saw Julia pick up her glass and sniff at
it with frank curiosity.
'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile. 'You will have read
about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am
afraid.' His face grew solemn again, and he raised his glass: 'I think it
is fitting that we should begin by drinking a health. To our Leader: To
Emmanuel Goldstein.'
Winston took up his glass with a certain eagerness. Wine was a thing he
had read and dreamed about. Like the glass paperweight or Mr Charrington's
half-remembered rhymes, it belonged to the vanished, romantic past, the
olden time as he liked to call it in his secret thoughts. For some reason
he had always thought of wine as having an intensely sweet taste, like
that of blackberry jam and an immediate intoxicating effect. Actually,
when he came to swallow it, the stuff was distinctly disappointing. The
truth was that after years of gin-drinking he could barely taste it. He
set down the empty glass.
'Then there is such a person as Goldstein?' he said.
'Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where, I do not know.'
'And the conspiracy--the organization? Is it real? It is not simply an
invention of the Thought Police?'
'No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will never learn much
more about the Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it.
I will come back to that presently.' He looked at his wrist-watch. 'It is
unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for
more than half an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and
you will have to leave separately. You, comrade'--he bowed his head to
Julia--'will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our disposal.
You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions.
In general terms, what are you prepared to do?'
'Anything that we are capable of,' said Winston.
O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing
Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that
Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his
eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as
though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers
were known to him already.
'You are prepared to give your lives?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit murder?'
'Yes.'
'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of
innocent people?'
'Yes.'
'To betray your country to foreign powers?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds
of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution,
to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause
demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'
'Yes.'
'If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric
acid in a child's face--are you prepared to do that?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life
as a waiter or a dock-worker?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another
again?'
'No!' broke in Julia.
It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a
moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His
tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word,
then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not
know which word he was going to say. 'No,' he said finally.
'You did well to tell me,' said O'Brien. 'It is necessary for us to know
everything.'
He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with somewhat more
expression in it:
'Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different
person? We may be obliged to give him a new identity. His face, his
movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair--even his voice
would be different. And you yourself might have become a different person.
Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is
necessary. Sometimes we even amputate a limb.'
Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin's
Mongolian face. There were no scars that he could see. Julia had turned a
shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she faced O'Brien
boldly. She murmured something that seemed to be assent.
'Good. Then that is settled.'
There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather
absent-minded air O'Brien pushed them towards the others, took one himself,
then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as though he could think
better standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and
well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper. O'Brien looked at
his wrist-watch again.
'You had better go back to your Pantry, Martin,' he said. 'I shall switch
on in a quarter of an hour. Take a good look at these comrades' faces
before you go. You will be seeing them again. I may not.'
Exactly as they had done at the front door, the little man's dark eyes
flickered over their faces. There was not a trace of friendliness in his
manner. He was memorizing their appearance, but he felt no interest in
them, or appeared to feel none. It occurred to Winston that a synthetic
face was perhaps incapable of changing its expression. Without speaking
or giving any kind of salutation, Martin went out, closing the door
silently behind him. O'Brien was strolling up and down, one hand in the
pocket of his black overalls, the other holding his cigarette.
'You understand,' he said, 'that you will be fighting in the dark. You
will always be in the dark. You will receive orders and you will obey them,
without knowing why. Later I shall send you a book from which you will
learn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategy by which
we shall destroy it. When you have read the book, you will be full members
of the Brotherhood. But between the general aims that we are fighting for
and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything. I
tell you that the Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it
numbers a hundred members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge
you will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen. You
will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as
they disappear. As this was your first contact, it will be preserved. When
you receive orders, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to
communicate with you, it will be through Martin. When you are finally
caught, you will confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very
little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to
betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not
even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a
different person, with a different face.'
He continued to move to and fro over the soft carpet. In spite of the
bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. It
came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket,
or manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an
impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony. However
much in earnest he might be, he had nothing of the single-mindedness that
belongs to a fanatic. When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease,
amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of persiflage.
'This is unavoidable,' his voice seemed to say; 'this is what we have got
to do, unflinchingly. But this is not what we shall be doing when life is
worth living again.' A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out
from Winston towards O'Brien. For the moment he had forgotten the shadowy
figure of Goldstein. When you looked at O'Brien's powerful shoulders and
his blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilized, it was impossible
to believe that he could be defeated. There was no stratagem that he was
not equal to, no danger that he could not foresee. Even Julia seemed to
be impressed. She had let her cigarette go out and was listening intently.
O'Brien went on:
'You will have heard rumours of the existence of the Brotherhood. No doubt
you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a
huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling
messages on walls, recognizing one another by codewords or by special
movements of the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the
Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, and it is impossible
for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others.
Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could
not give them a complete list of members, or any information that would
lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot
be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense.
Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You
will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no
comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will
get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely
necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to
smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell. You will have to get used
to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while,
you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are
the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any
perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead.
Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls
of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there
is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible
except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act
collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to
individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police
there is no other way.'
He halted and looked for the third time at his wrist-watch.
'It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,' he said to Julia. 'Wait.
The decanter is still half full.'
He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the stem.
'What shall it be this time?' he said, still with the same faint
suggestion of irony. 'To the confusion of the Thought Police? To the
death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?'
'To the past,' said Winston.
'The past is more important,' agreed O'Brien gravely.
They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood up to go.
O'Brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat
white tablet which he told her to place on her tongue. It was important,
he said, not to go out smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very
observant. As soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared to forget
her existence. He took another pace or two up and down, then stopped.
'There are details to be settled,' he said. 'I assume that you have a
hiding-place of some kind?'
Winston explained about the room over Mr Charrington's shop.
'That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something else for you.
It is important to change one's hiding-place frequently. Meanwhile I shall
send you a copy of THE BOOK'--even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to
pronounce the words as though they were in italics--'Goldstein's book, you
understand, as soon as possible. It may be some days before I can get hold
of one. There are not many in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought
Police hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as we can produce
them. It makes very little difference. The book is indestructible. If
the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word. Do
you carry a brief-case to work with you?' he added.
'As a rule, yes.'
'What is it like?'
'Black, very shabby. With two straps.'
'Black, two straps, very shabby--good. One day in the fairly near
future--I cannot give a date--one of the messages among your morning's
work will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a
repeat. On the following day you will go to work without your brief-case.
At some time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the
arm and say "I think you have dropped your brief-case." The one he gives
you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book. You will return it within
fourteen days.'
They were silent for a moment.
'There are a couple of minutes before you need go,' said O'Brien. 'We
shall meet again--if we do meet again----'
Winston looked up at him. 'In the place where there is no darkness?'
he said hesitantly.
O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. 'In the place where there
is no darkness,' he said, as though he had recognized the allusion. 'And
in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave?
Any message? Any question?.'
Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he
wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding
generalities. Instead of anything directly connected with O'Brien or the
Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the
dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room
over Mr Charrington's shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel
engraving in its rosewood frame. Almost at random he said:
'Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins "Oranges and lemons,
say the bells of St Clement's"?'
Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he completed the
stanza:
'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey,
When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.'
'You knew the last line!' said Winston.
'Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go.
But wait. You had better let me give you one of these tablets.'
As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His powerful grip crushed
the bones of Winston's palm. At the door Winston looked back, but O'Brien
seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind. He was waiting
with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen. Beyond him
Winston could see the writing-table with its green-shaded lamp and the
speakwrite and the wire baskets deep-laden with papers. The incident was
closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, O'Brien would be back
at his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party.
Chapter 9
Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. Gelatinous was the right word. It had
come into his head spontaneously. His body seemed to have not only the
weakness of a jelly, but its translucency. He felt that if he held up his
hand he would be able to see the light through it. All the blood and
lymph had been drained out of him by an enormous debauch of work, leaving
only a frail structure of nerves, bones, and skin. All sensations seemed
to be magnified. His overalls fretted his shoulders, the pavement tickled
his feet, even the opening and closing of a hand was an effort that made
his joints creak.
He had worked more than ninety hours in five days. So had everyone else in
the Ministry. Now it was all over, and he had literally nothing to do, no
Party work of any description, until tomorrow morning. He could spend six
hours in the hiding-place and another nine in his own bed. Slowly, in
mild afternoon sunshine, he walked up a dingy street in the direction
of Mr Charrington's shop, keeping one eye open for the patrols, but
irrationally convinced that this afternoon there was no danger of anyone
interfering with him. The heavy brief-case that he was carrying bumped
against his knee at each step, sending a tingling sensation up and down
the skin of his leg. Inside it was the book, which he had now had in his
possession for six days and had not yet opened, nor even looked at.
On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the
shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks,
the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet,
the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes,
the booming of guns--after six days of this, when the great orgasm was
quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up
into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the
2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last
day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to
pieces--at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not
after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia
was an ally.
There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely
it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that
Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a
demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it
happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were
luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people,
including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the
Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small
lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over
which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little
Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the
microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony
arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by
the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres,
deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of
civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was
almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then
maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the
voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose
uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all
came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps
twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of
paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without
pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the
content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different.
Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous
commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated
were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was
sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous
interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds
and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in
clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from
the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator,
still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward,
his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech.
One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the
crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had
been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had
switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only
without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at the moment
he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the moment of disorder
while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not
see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Excuse me, I think you've
dropped your brief-case.' He took the brief-case abstractedly, without
speaking. He knew that it would be days before he had an opportunity to
look inside it. The instant that the demonstration was over he went
straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly
twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise.
The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to their
posts, were hardly necessary.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with
Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now
completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books,
pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs--all had to be rectified at
lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that
the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference
to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in
existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because
the processes that it involved could not be called by their true
names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the
twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought
up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors: meals consisted of
sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from
the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of
sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he
crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower
of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half-burying the
speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job was
always to stack them into a neat enough pile to give him room to work.
What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical.
Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any
detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the
geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one
part of the world to another was considerable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed wiping
every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushing physical task,
something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless
neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had time to remember
it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he murmured into the
speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a deliberate lie. He was
as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be
perfect. On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of cylinders slowed
down. For as much as half an hour nothing came out of the tube; then one
more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same time the work
was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went through the
Department. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had been
achieved. It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary
evidence that the war with Eurasia had ever happened. At twelve hundred it
was unexpectedly announced that all workers in the Ministry were free till
tomorrow morning. Winston, still carrying the brief-case containing the
book, which had remained between his feet while he worked and under his
body while he slept, went home, shaved himself, and almost fell asleep in
his bath, although the water was barely more than tepid.
With a sort of voluptuous creaking in his joints he climbed the stair above
Mr Charrington's shop. He was tired, but not sleepy any longer. He opened
the window, lit the dirty little oilstove and put on a pan of water for
coffee. Julia would arrive presently: meanwhile there was the book. He
sat down in the sluttish armchair and undid the straps of the brief-case.
A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the
cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at
the edges, and fell apart, easily, as though the book had passed through
many hands. The inscription on the title-page ran:
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein
Winston began reading:
Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle,
and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne
countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the
essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous
upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always
reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium,
however far it is pushed one way or the other.
The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...
Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he
was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at
the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the
page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From
somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room
itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled
deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss,
it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one
knows that one will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it
at a different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on reading:
Chapter III
War is Peace
The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event
which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth
century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire
by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and
Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only
emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The
frontiers between the three super-states are in some places arbitrary, and
in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general
they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern
part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering
Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the
British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia,
smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier,
comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands
and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at
war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no
longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early
decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between
combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause
for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference.
This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing
attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous.
On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries,
and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction
of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which
extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal,
and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy,
meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of
people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few
casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague
frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round
the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In
the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage
of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may
cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. More
exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of
importance. Motives which were already present to some small extent in the
great wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and
are consciously recognized and acted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war--for in spite of the regrouping
which occurs every few years, it is always the same war--one must realize
in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of
the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other
two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences
are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania
by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity
and industriousness of its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in
a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of
self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared
to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of
previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials
is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of the three
super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that
it needs within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct
economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between the frontiers of
the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them,
there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville,
Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population
of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions,
and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly
struggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the
disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the
chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery
that dictates the endless changes of alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of
them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder
climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods.
But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever
power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or
Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies
of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.
The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status
of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended
like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture
more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments,
to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that
the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas.
The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo
and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian
Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by
Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and
Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to
enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored:
but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory
which forms the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate.
Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not
really necessary to the world's economy. They add nothing to the wealth of
the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and
the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which
to wage another war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo
of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the
structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself,
would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of
DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by
the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the
machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end
of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of
consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when
few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not
urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes
of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry,
dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and
still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of
that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of
a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient--a
glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete--was
part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and
technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to
assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly
because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and
revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on
the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly
regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it
was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various
devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage,
have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped,
and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been
fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still
there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it
was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and
therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the
machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt,
illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.
And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of
automatic process--by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible
not to distribute--the machine did raise the living standards of the
average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at
the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the
destruction--indeed, in some sense was the destruction--of a hierarchical
society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to
eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed
a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most
important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once
became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no
doubt, to imagine a society in which WEALTH, in the sense of personal
possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while POWER
remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such
a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were
enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally
stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for
themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later
realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep
it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a
basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as
some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of
doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency
towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost
the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially
backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated,
directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by
restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during
the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy
of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation,
capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were
prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this,
too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted
were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was
how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real
wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be
distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by
continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives,
but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces,
or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea,
materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable,
and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are
not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of
expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.
A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that
would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as
obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with
further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle
the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might
exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs
of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is
a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on
as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups
somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity
increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the
distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early
twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere,
laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy
his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the
better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three
servants, his private motor-car or helicopter--set him in a different world
from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have
a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call
'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the
possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and
poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and
therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste
seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but
accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would
be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building
temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even
by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But
this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a
hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses,
whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work,
but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is
expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow
limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant
fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic
triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality
appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is
actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does
not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is
that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which
the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an
atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks
one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party
that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity
as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party
to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often
be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or
is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such
knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of DOUBLETHINK. Meanwhile
no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that
the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania
the undisputed master of the entire world.
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an
article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more
and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of
power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. The search
for new weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining
activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any
outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has
almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The
empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of
the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of
Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can
in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful
arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are
cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But
in matters of vital importance--meaning, in effect, war and police
espionage--the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least
tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of
the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent
thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is
concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another
human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred
million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In
so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter.
The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor,
studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions,
gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of
drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist,
physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special
subject as are relevant to the taking of life. In the vast laboratories
of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the
Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of
the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are
concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise
larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more
and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier
gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities
as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease
germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce
a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under
the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship;
others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays
through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or
producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at
the earth's centre.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, and none
of the three super-states ever gains a significant lead on the others.
What is more remarkable is that all three powers already possess, in the
atomic bomb, a weapon far more powerful than any that their present
researches are likely to discover. Although the Party, according to its
habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as
early as the nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about
ten years later. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on
industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and
North America. The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all
countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized
society, and hence of their own power. Thereafter, although no formal
agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more bombs were dropped. All three
powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store them up against
the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later.
And meanwhile the art of war has remained almost stationary for thirty or
forty years. Helicopters are more used than they were formerly, bombing
planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles, and the
fragile movable battleship has given way to the almost unsinkable Floating
Fortress; but otherwise there has been little development. The tank, the
submarine, the torpedo, the machine gun, even the rifle and the hand
grenade are still in use. And in spite of the endless slaughters reported
in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier wars,
in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often killed
in a few weeks, have never been repeated.
None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre which involves
the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation is undertaken, it is
usually a surprise attack against an ally. The strategy that all three
powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are following,
is the same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and
well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely
encircling one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of
friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years
as to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic
bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots; finally they will all
be fired simultaneously, with effects so devastating as to make retaliation
impossible. It will then be time to sign a pact of friendship with the
remaining world-power, in preparation for another attack. This scheme, it
is hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of realization.
Moreover, no fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the
Equator and the Pole: no invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken.
This explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between the
super-states are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the
British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other
hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine
or even to the Vistula. But this would violate the principle, followed on
all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were
to conquer the areas that used once to be known as France and Germany, it
would be necessary either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great
physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred
million people, who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly on
the Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all three super-states.
It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no
contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners
and coloured slaves. Even the official ally of the moment is always
regarded with the darkest suspicion. War prisoners apart, the average
citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or
Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he
were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are
creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about
them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the
fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might
evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia,
or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must
never be crossed by anything except bombs.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and
acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states
are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called
Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is
called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps
better rendered as Obliteration of the Self. The citizen of Oceania is not
allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but
he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and
common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable,
and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all.
Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of
semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous
warfare. It follows that the three super-states not only cannot conquer
one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary,
so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three
sheaves of corn. And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are
simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives are
dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that
the war should continue everlastingly and without victory. Meanwhile the
fact that there IS no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of
reality which is the special feature of Ingsoc and its rival systems of
thought. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that
by becoming continuous war has fundamentally changed its character.
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or
later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the
past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies
were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried
to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could
not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military
efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other
result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat
had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or
religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when
one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient
nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for
efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was
necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly
accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history
books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of
the kind that is practised today would have been impossible. War was a
sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned
it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be
won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.
But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous.
When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity.
Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or
disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific
are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a
kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important.
Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is
efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police. Since each of the three
super-states is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within
which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised. Reality
only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life--the need to
eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or
stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like. Between life and death,
and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a
distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world,
and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar
space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down.
The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars
could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving
to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged
to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but
once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape
they choose.
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is
merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant
animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of
hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It
eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the
special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will
be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups
of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and
therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another,
and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are
not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling
group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make
or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society
intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would
probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to
exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the
Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been
replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same
if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree
to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For
in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever
from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly
permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This--although the vast
majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense--is the
inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a
rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the
forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude
and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness
of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from
the window that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more
exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but
that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it
had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was
the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful,
more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those
that tell you what you know already. He had just turned back to Chapter I
when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair and started out of his chair
to meet her. She dumped her brown tool-bag on the floor and flung herself
into his arms. It was more than a week since they had seen one another.
'I've got THE BOOK,' he said as they disentangled themselves.
'Oh, you've got it? Good,' she said without much interest, and almost
immediately knelt down beside the oil stove to make the coffee.
They did not return to the subject until they had been in bed for half an
hour. The evening was just cool enough to make it worth while to pull up
the counterpane. From below came the familiar sound of singing and the
scrape of boots on the flagstones. The brawny red-armed woman whom Winston
had seen there on his first visit was almost a fixture in the yard. There
seemed to be no hour of daylight when she was not marching to and fro
between the washtub and the line, alternately gagging herself with clothes
pegs and breaking forth into lusty song. Julia had settled down on her
side and seemed to be already on the point of falling asleep. He reached
out for the book, which was lying on the floor, and sat up against the
bedhead.
'We must read it,' he said. 'You too. All members of the Brotherhood have
to read it.'
'You read it,' she said with her eyes shut. 'Read it aloud. That's the
best way. Then you can explain it to me as you go.'
The clock's hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had three or four hours
ahead of them. He propped the book against his knees and began reading:
Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age,
there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle,
and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne
countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their
attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the
essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous
upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always
reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium,
however far it is pushed one way or the other
'Julia, are you awake?' said Winston.
'Yes, my love, I'm listening. Go on. It's marvellous.'
He continued reading:
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of
the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change
places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim--for it
is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed
by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside
their daily lives--is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in
which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is
the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods
the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always
comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their
capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the
Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they
are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their
objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of
servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group
splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the
struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never
even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an
exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of
a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human
being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no
advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has
ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of
the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the
name of their masters.
By the late nineteenth century the recurrence of this pattern had become
obvious to many observers. There then rose schools of thinkers who
interpreted history as a cyclical process and claimed to show that
inequality was the unalterable law of human life. This doctrine, of course,
had always had its adherents, but in the manner in which it was now put
forward there was a significant change. In the past the need for a
hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the
High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests,
lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally
been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the
grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made
use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity. Now, however, the
concept of human brotherhood began to be assailed by people who were not
yet in positions of command, but merely hoped to be so before long. In the
past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and
then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown.
The new Middle groups in effect proclaimed their tyranny beforehand.
Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was
the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions
of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages.
But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the
aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly
abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the
century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as
it is commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating
UNfreedom and INequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the
old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their
ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze
history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once
more, and then stop. As usual, the High were to be turned out by the
Middle, who would then become the High; but this time, by conscious
strategy, the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.
The new doctrines arose partly because of the accumulation of historical
knowledge, and the growth of the historical sense, which had hardly existed
before the nineteenth century. The cyclical movement of history was now
intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it
was alterable. But the principal, underlying cause was that, as early
as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become
technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their
native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that
favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real
need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier
ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable.
Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine
production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary
for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary
for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from
the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power,
human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to
be averted. In more primitive ages, when a just and peaceful society was
in fact not possible, it had been fairly easy to believe it. The idea of
an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of
brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had haunted the human
imagination for thousands of years. And this vision had had a certain hold
even on the groups who actually profited by each historical change. The
heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed
in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality
before the law, and the like, and have even allowed their conduct to be
influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the
twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were
authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the
moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever
name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the
general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which
had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years--imprisonment
without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions,
torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation
of whole populations--not only became common again, but were tolerated
and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and
progressive.
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions, and
counter-revolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals
emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been
foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which
had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world
which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What
kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new
aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists,
technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists,
teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose
origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the
working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of
monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their
opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by
luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what
they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last
difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the
tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups
were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to
leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be
uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church
of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason
for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its
citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however,
made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio
carried the process further. With the development of television, and
the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit
simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every
citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching,
could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police
and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of
communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete
obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion
on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society
regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High
group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what
was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the
only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege
are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called
'abolition of private property' which took place in the middle years of
the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer
hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a
group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the
Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the
Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and
disposes of the products as it thinks fit. In the years following the
Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost
unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of
collectivization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class
were expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the
capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses,
transport--everything had been taken away from them: and since these
things were no longer private property, it followed that they must be
public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement
and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in
the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand,
that economic inequality has been made permanent.
But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than
this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power.
Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that
the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented
Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and
willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule
all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could
guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately
the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.
After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in reality
disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in
fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable through slow
demographic changes which a government with wide powers can easily avert.
The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never
revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are
oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of
comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. The
recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are
not now permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations
can and do happen without having political results, because there is no
way in which discontent can become articulate. As for the problem of
over-production, which has been latent in our society since the development
of machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare
(see Chapter III), which is also useful in keying up public morale to the
necessary pitch. From the point of view of our present rulers, therefore,
the only genuine dangers are the splitting-off of a new group of able,
under-employed, power-hungry people, and the growth of liberalism and
scepticism in their own ranks. The problem, that is to say, is educational.
It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the
directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately
below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in
a negative way.
Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already,
the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid comes
Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success,
every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all
knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue
directly from his leadership and inspiration. Nobody has ever seen Big
Brother. He is a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen. We
may be reasonably sure that he will never die, and there is already
considerable uncertainty as to when he was born. Big Brother is the guise
in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is
to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which
are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization.
Below Big Brother comes the Inner Party. Its numbers limited to six
millions, or something less than 2 per cent of the population of Oceania.
Below the Inner Party comes the Outer Party, which, if the Inner Party is
described as the brain of the State, may be justly likened to the hands.
Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the
proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population. In the terms
of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low: for the slave
population of the equatorial lands who pass constantly from conqueror
to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure.
In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. The
child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party.
Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the
age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked
domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of
pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and
the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of
that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that
they are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has
no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody
knows. Except that English is its chief LINGUA FRANCA and Newspeak its
official language, it is not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not
held together by blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is
true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what
at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro
movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism or
even in the pre-industrial age. Between the two branches of the Party
there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure
that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious
members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise.
Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The
most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent,
are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this
state of affairs is not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of
principle. The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does
not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there
were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be
perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of
the proletariat. In the crucial years, the fact that the Party was not a
hereditary body did a great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind
of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called
'class privilege' assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent.
He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical,
nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been
shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church
have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of
oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of
a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon
the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate
its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but
with perpetuating itself. WHO wields power is not important, provided that
the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that
characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of
the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being
perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion,
is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared.
Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and
from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without
any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world
could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance
of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly;
but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the
level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses
hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can
be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party
member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on
the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.
A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought
Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone.
Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in
bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is
being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his
relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression
of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the
characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not
only any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any
change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom
of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of
choice in any direction whatever. On the other hand his actions are not
regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania
there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain
death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests,
tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment
for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the
wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the
future. A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions,
but the right instincts. Many of the beliefs and attitudes demanded of him
are never plainly stated, and could not be stated without laying bare the
contradictions inherent in Ingsoc. If he is a person naturally orthodox
(in Newspeak a GOODTHINKER), he will in all circumstances know, without
taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion. But in
any case an elaborate mental training, undergone in childhood and grouping
itself round the Newspeak words CRIMESTOP, BLACKWHITE, and DOUBLETHINK,
makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever.
A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites
from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred
of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and
self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents
produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards
and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the
speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude
are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first
and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young
children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP. CRIMESTOP means the faculty
of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous
thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to
perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if
they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train
of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP,
in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the
contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own
mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.
Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is
omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big
Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need
for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.
The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has
two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the
habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the
plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to
say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means
also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that
black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.
This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the
system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known
in Newspeak as DOUBLETHINK.
The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is
subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that
the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions
partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from
the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is
necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and
that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by
far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the
need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that
speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought
up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in
all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political
alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's
policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia
(whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always
have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise then the facts must
be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day
falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as
necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and
espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events,
it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written
records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the
memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records
and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that
the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that
though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific
instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at
the moment, then this new version IS the past, and no different past can
ever have existed. This holds good even when, as often happens, the same
event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the course of
a year. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and
clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now.
It will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the
training of memory. To make sure that all written records agree with
the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also
necessary to REMEMBER that events happened in the desired manner. And if
it is necessary to rearrange one's memories or to tamper with written
records, then it is necessary to FORGET that one has done so. The trick of
doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned
by the majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent
as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, 'reality
control'. In Newspeak it is called DOUBLETHINK, though DOUBLETHINK
comprises much else as well.
DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's
mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual
knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows
that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of DOUBLETHINK
he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to
be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision,
but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of
falsity and hence of guilt. DOUBLETHINK lies at the very heart of Ingsoc,
since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while
retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell
deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that
has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to
draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the
existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the
reality which one denies--all this is indispensably necessary. Even in
using the word DOUBLETHINK it is necessary to exercise DOUBLETHINK. For
by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a
fresh act of DOUBLETHINK one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely,
with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means
of DOUBLETHINK that the Party has been able--and may, for all we know,
continue to be able for thousands of years--to arrest the course of
history.
All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified
or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed
to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or
they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have
used force, and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say,
either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the
achievement of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which
both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual
basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule,
and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.
For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own
infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.
It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of DOUBLETHINK are
those who invented DOUBLETHINK and know that it is a vast system of mental
cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is
happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is.
In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the
more intelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the
fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social
scale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are
the subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war
is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies
like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete
indifference to them. They are aware that a change of overlordship means
simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who
treat them in the same manner as the old ones. The slightly more favoured
workers whom we call 'the proles' are only intermittently conscious of the
war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and
hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for
long periods that the war is happening. It is in the ranks of the Party,
and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found.
World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be
impossible. This peculiar linking-together of opposites--knowledge with
ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism--is one of the chief distinguishing
marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions
even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects
and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally
stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches
a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it
dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual
workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the
solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a
direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the
four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in
their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns
itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love
with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These
contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary
hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in DOUBLETHINK. For it is only
by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.
In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is
to be for ever averted--if the High, as we have called them, are to keep
their places permanently--then the prevailing mental condition must be
controlled insanity.
But there is one question which until this moment we have almost ignored.
It is; WHY should human equality be averted? Supposing that the mechanics
of the process have been rightly described, what is the motive for this
huge, accurately planned effort to freeze history at a particular moment
of time?
Here we reach the central secret. As we have seen. the mystique of the
Party, and above all of the Inner Party, depends upon DOUBLETHINK But
deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct
that first led to the seizure of power and brought DOUBLETHINK, the
Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary
paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists...
Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound. It
seemed to him that Julia had been very still for some time past. She was
lying on her side, naked from the waist upwards, with her cheek pillowed
on her hand and one dark lock tumbling across her eyes. Her breast rose
and fell slowly and regularly.
'Julia.'
No answer.
'Julia, are you awake?'
No answer. She was asleep. He shut the book, put it carefully on the floor,
lay down, and pulled the coverlet over both of them.
He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood
HOW; he did not understand WHY. Chapter I, like Chapter III, had not
actually told him anything that he did not know, it had merely systematized
the knowledge that he possessed already. But after reading it he knew
better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a
minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was
untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you
were not mad. A yellow beam from the sinking sun slanted in through the
window and fell across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face
and the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy,
confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep
murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,' with the feeling that this remark
contained in it a profound wisdom.
*****
When he woke it was with the sensation of having slept for a long time,
but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only
twenty-thirty. He lay dozing for a while; then the usual deep-lunged
singing struck up from the yard below:
'It was only an 'opeless fancy,
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!'
The drivelling song seemed to have kept its popularity. You still heard it
all over the place. It had outlived the Hate Song. Julia woke at the
sound, stretched herself luxuriously, and got out of bed.
'I'm hungry,' she said. 'Let's make some more coffee. Damn! The stove's
gone out and the water's cold.' She picked the stove up and shook it.
'There's no oil in it.'
'We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.'
'The funny thing is I made sure it was full. I'm going to put my clothes
on,' she added. 'It seems to have got colder.'
Winston also got up and dressed himself. The indefatigable voice sang on:
'They sye that time 'eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years
They twist my 'eart-strings yet!'
As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window.
The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the
yard any longer. The flagstones were wet as though they had just been
washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh
and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman
marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling
silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He wondered
whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty
or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across to his side; together they
gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he
looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching
up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him
for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to
him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by
childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the
grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and
after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block
of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body
of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held
inferior to the flower?
'She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to
the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would
ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of
mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down
there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile
belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might
easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps,
of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized
fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been
laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending,
scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over
thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical
reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of
the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney-pots into
interminable distance. It was curious to think that the sky was the same
for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people
under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world,
hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant
of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and
yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but who
were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that
would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!
Without having read to the end of THE BOOK, he knew that that must be
Goldstein's final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he
be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be
just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes,
because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is
equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength
would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not
doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end
their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a
thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds,
passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share
and could not kill.
'Do you remember,' he said, 'the thrush that sang to us, that first day,
at the edge of the wood?'
'He wasn't singing to us,' said Julia. 'He was singing to please himself.
Not even that. He was just singing.'
The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the
world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious,
forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin,
in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and
Japan--everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous
by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.
Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.
You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that
future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed
on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
'We are the dead,' he said.
'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.
'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.
They sprang apart. Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He
could see the white all round the irises of Julia's eyes. Her face had
turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone
stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.
'You are the dead,' repeated the iron voice.
'It was behind the picture,' breathed Julia.
'It was behind the picture,' said the voice. 'Remain exactly where you
are. Make no movement until you are ordered.'
It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing except
stand gazing into one another's eyes. To run for life, to get out of the
house before it was too late--no such thought occurred to them. Unthinkable
to disobey the iron voice from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch
had been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had fallen
to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it.
'Now they can see us,' said Julia.
'Now we can see you,' said the voice. 'Stand out in the middle of the
room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch
one another.'
They were not touching, but it seemed to him that he could feel Julia's
body shaking. Or perhaps it was merely the shaking of his own. He could
just stop his teeth from chattering, but his knees were beyond his control.
There was a sound of trampling boots below, inside the house and outside.
The yard seemed to be full of men. Something was being dragged across the
stones. The woman's singing had stopped abruptly. There was a long, rolling
clang, as though the washtub had been flung across the yard, and then a
confusion of angry shouts which ended in a yell of pain.
'The house is surrounded,' said Winston.
'The house is surrounded,' said the voice.
He heard Julia snap her teeth together. 'I suppose we may as well say
good-bye,' she said.
'You may as well say good-bye,' said the voice. And then another quite
different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression
of having heard before, struck in; 'And by the way, while we are on the
subject, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to
chop off your head"!'
Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston's back. The head of a ladder
had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was
climbing through the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs.
The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on
their feet and truncheons in their hands.
Winston was not trembling any longer. Even his eyes he barely moved. One
thing alone mattered; to keep still, to keep still and not give them an
excuse to hit you! A man with a smooth prize-fighter's jowl in which the
mouth was only a slit paused opposite him balancing his truncheon
meditatively between thumb and forefinger. Winston met his eyes. The
feeling of nakedness, with one's hands behind one's head and one's face
and body all exposed, was almost unbearable. The man protruded the tip
of a white tongue, licked the place where his lips should have been, and
then passed on. There was another crash. Someone had picked up the glass
paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearth-stone.
The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from
a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it
always was! There was a gasp and a thump behind him, and he received a
violent kick on the ankle which nearly flung him off his balance. One of
the men had smashed his fist into Julia's solar plexus, doubling her up
like a pocket ruler. She was thrashing about on the floor, fighting for
breath. Winston dared not turn his head even by a millimetre, but sometimes
her livid, gasping face came within the angle of his vision. Even in his
terror it was as though he could feel the pain in his own body, the deadly
pain which nevertheless was less urgent than the struggle to get back her
breath. He knew what it was like; the terrible, agonizing pain which was
there all the while but could not be suffered yet, because before all else
it was necessary to be able to breathe. Then two of the men hoisted her
up by knees and shoulders, and carried her out of the room like a sack.
Winston had a glimpse of her face, upside down, yellow and contorted, with
the eyes shut, and still with a smear of rouge on either cheek; and that
was the last he saw of her.
He stood dead still. No one had hit him yet. Thoughts which came of their
own accord but seemed totally uninteresting began to flit through his
mind. He wondered whether they had got Mr Charrington. He wondered what
they had done to the woman in the yard. He noticed that he badly wanted
to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or
three hours ago. He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine,
meaning twenty-one. But the light seemed too strong. Would not the light
be fading at twenty-one hours on an August evening? He wondered whether
after all he and Julia had mistaken the time--had slept the clock round
and thought it was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty
on the following morning. But he did not pursue the thought further.
It was not interesting.
There was another, lighter step in the passage. Mr Charrington came into
the room. The demeanour of the black-uniformed men suddenly became more
subdued. Something had also changed in Mr Charrington's appearance. His
eye fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight.
'Pick up those pieces,' he said sharply.
A man stooped to obey. The cockney accent had disappeared; Winston suddenly
realized whose voice it was that he had heard a few moments ago on the
telescreen. Mr Charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but
his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he was not
wearing his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though
verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was
still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer. His body
had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone
only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation.
The black eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole
lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It
was the alert, cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty. It occurred to
Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge,
at a member of the Thought Police.
PART THREE
Chapter 1
He did not know where he was. Presumably he was in the Ministry of Love,
but there was no way of making certain. He was in a high-ceilinged
windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps
flooded it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound
which he supposed had something to do with the air supply. A bench, or
shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken only by the
door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden
seat. There were four telescreens, one in each wall.
There was a dull aching in his belly. It had been there ever since they
had bundled him into the closed van and driven him away. But he was also
hungry, with a gnawing, unwholesome kind of hunger. It might be twenty-four
hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did not know,
probably never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when
they arrested him. Since he was arrested he had not been fed.
He sat as still as he could on the narrow bench, with his hands crossed
on his knee. He had already learned to sit still. If you made unexpected
movements they yelled at you from the telescreen. But the craving for food
was growing upon him. What he longed for above all was a piece of bread.
He had an idea that there were a few breadcrumbs in the pocket of his
overalls. It was even possible--he thought this because from time to time
something seemed to tickle his leg--that there might be a sizeable bit of
crust there. In the end the temptation to find out overcame his fear; he
slipped a hand into his pocket.
'Smith!' yelled a voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Hands out of
pockets in the cells!'
He sat still again, his hands crossed on his knee. Before being brought
here he had been taken to another place which must have been an ordinary
prison or a temporary lock-up used by the patrols. He did not know how
long he had been there; some hours at any rate; with no clocks and no
daylight it was hard to gauge the time. It was a noisy, evil-smelling
place. They had put him into a cell similar to the one he was now in,
but filthily dirty and at all times crowded by ten or fifteen people. The
majority of them were common criminals, but there were a few political
prisoners among them. He had sat silent against the wall, jostled by dirty
bodies, too preoccupied by fear and the pain in his belly to take much
interest in his surroundings, but still noticing the astonishing difference
in demeanour between the Party prisoners and the others. The Party
prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals
seemed to care nothing for anybody. They yelled insults at the guards,
fought back fiercely when their belongings were impounded, wrote obscene
words on the floor, ate smuggled food which they produced from mysterious
hiding-places in their clothes, and even shouted down the telescreen when
it tried to restore order. On the other hand some of them seemed to be on
good terms with the guards, called them by nicknames, and tried to wheedle
cigarettes through the spyhole in the door. The guards, too, treated the
common criminals with a certain forbearance, even when they had to handle
them roughly. There was much talk about the forced-labour camps to which
most of the prisoners expected to be sent. It was 'all right' in the
camps, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts and knew the ropes.
There was bribery, favouritism, and racketeering of every kind, there was
homosexuality and prostitution, there was even illicit alcohol distilled
from potatoes. The positions of trust were given only to the common
criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers, who formed a sort
of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals.
There was a constant come-and-go of prisoners of every description:
drug-peddlers, thieves, bandits, black-marketeers, drunks, prostitutes.
Some of the drunks were so violent that the other prisoners had to combine
to suppress them. An enormous wreck of a woman, aged about sixty, with
great tumbling breasts and thick coils of white hair which had come down
in her struggles, was carried in, kicking and shouting, by four guards,
who had hold of her one at each corner. They wrenched off the boots with
which she had been trying to kick them, and dumped her down across
Winston's lap, almost breaking his thigh-bones. The woman hoisted herself
upright and followed them out with a yell of 'F---- bastards!' Then,
noticing that she was sitting on something uneven, she slid off Winston's
knees on to the bench.
'Beg pardon, dearie,' she said. 'I wouldn't 'a sat on you, only the buggers
put me there. They dono 'ow to treat a lady, do they?' She paused, patted
her breast, and belched. 'Pardon,' she said, 'I ain't meself, quite.'
She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor.
'Thass better,' she said, leaning back with closed eyes. 'Never keep it
down, thass what I say. Get it up while it's fresh on your stomach, like.'
She revived, turned to have another look at Winston and seemed immediately
to take a fancy to him. She put a vast arm round his shoulder and drew him
towards her, breathing beer and vomit into his face.
'Wass your name, dearie?' she said.
'Smith,' said Winston.
'Smith?' said the woman. 'Thass funny. My name's Smith too. Why,' she
added sentimentally, 'I might be your mother!'
She might, thought Winston, be his mother. She was about the right age and
physique, and it was probable that people changed somewhat after twenty
years in a forced-labour camp.
No one else had spoken to him. To a surprising extent the ordinary
criminals ignored the Party prisoners. 'The polITS,' they called them,
with a sort of uninterested contempt. The Party prisoners seemed terrified
of speaking to anybody, and above all of speaking to one another. Only
once, when two Party members, both women, were pressed close together on
the bench, he overheard amid the din of voices a few hurriedly-whispered
words; and in particular a reference to something called 'room one-oh-one',
which he did not understand.
It might be two or three hours ago that they had brought him here. The
dull pain in his belly never went away, but sometimes it grew better and
sometimes worse, and his thoughts expanded or contracted accordingly. When
it grew worse he thought only of the pain itself, and of his desire for
food. When it grew better, panic took hold of him. There were moments
when he foresaw the things that would happen to him with such actuality
that his heart galloped and his breath stopped. He felt the smash of
truncheons on his elbows and iron-shod boots on his shins; he saw himself
grovelling on the floor, screaming for mercy through broken teeth. He
hardly thought of Julia. He could not fix his mind on her. He loved her
and would not betray her; but that was only a fact, known as he knew the
rules of arithmetic. He felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered
what was happening to her. He thought oftener of O'Brien, with a flickering
hope. O'Brien might know that he had been arrested. The Brotherhood, he
had said, never tried to save its members. But there was the razor blade;
they would send the razor blade if they could. There would be perhaps five
seconds before the guard could rush into the cell. The blade would bite
into him with a sort of burning coldness, and even the fingers that held
it would be cut to the bone. Everything came back to his sick body, which
shrank trembling from the smallest pain. He was not certain that he would
use the razor blade even if he got the chance. It was more natural to exist
from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes' life even with the
certainty that there was torture at the end of it.
Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of porcelain bricks in the
walls of the cell. It should have been easy, but he always lost count at
some point or another. More often he wondered where he was, and what time
of day it was. At one moment he felt certain that it was broad daylight
outside, and at the next equally certain that it was pitch darkness. In
this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be turned out.
It was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O'Brien had seemed to
recognize the allusion. In the Ministry of Love there were no windows. His
cell might be at the heart of the building or against its outer wall; it
might be ten floors below ground, or thirty above it. He moved himself
mentally from place to place, and tried to determine by the feeling of his
body whether he was perched high in the air or buried deep underground.
There was a sound of marching boots outside. The steel door opened with
a clang. A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure who seemed to
glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured
face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway. He motioned
to the guards outside to bring in the prisoner they were leading. The
poet Ampleforth shambled into the cell. The door clanged shut again.
Ampleforth made one or two uncertain movements from side to side, as
though having some idea that there was another door to go out of, and then
began to wander up and down the cell. He had not yet noticed Winston's
presence. His troubled eyes were gazing at the wall about a metre above
the level of Winston's head. He was shoeless; large, dirty toes were
sticking out of the holes in his socks. He was also several days away
from a shave. A scrubby beard covered his face to the cheekbones, giving
him an air of ruffianism that went oddly with his large weak frame and
nervous movements.
Winston roused himself a little from his lethargy. He must speak
to Ampleforth, and risk the yell from the telescreen. It was even
conceivable that Ampleforth was the bearer of the razor blade.
'Ampleforth,' he said.
There was no yell from the telescreen. Ampleforth paused, mildly startled.
His eyes focused themselves slowly on Winston.
'Ah, Smith!' he said. 'You too!'
'What are you in for?'
'To tell you the truth--' He sat down awkwardly on the bench opposite
Winston. 'There is only one offence, is there not?' he said.
'And have you committed it?'
'Apparently I have.'
He put a hand to his forehead and pressed his temples for a moment, as
though trying to remember something.
'These things happen,' he began vaguely. 'I have been able to recall one
instance--a possible instance. It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly. We
were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the
word "God" to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!' he added
almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. 'It was impossible
to change the line. The rhyme was "rod". Do you realize that there are only
twelve rhymes to "rod" in the entire language? For days I had racked my
brains. There WAS no other rhyme.'
The expression on his face changed. The annoyance passed out of it and for
a moment he looked almost pleased. A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy
of the pedant who has found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt
and scrubby hair.
'Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English
poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks
rhymes?'
No, that particular thought had never occurred to Winston. Nor, in the
circumstances, did it strike him as very important or interesting.
'Do you know what time of day it is?' he said.
Ampleforth looked startled again. 'I had hardly thought about it. They
arrested me--it could be two days ago--perhaps three.' His eyes flitted
round the walls, as though he half expected to find a window somewhere.
'There is no difference between night and day in this place. I do not see
how one can calculate the time.'
They talked desultorily for some minutes, then, without apparent reason,
a yell from the telescreen bade them be silent. Winston sat quietly, his
hands crossed. Ampleforth, too large to sit in comfort on the narrow
bench, fidgeted from side to side, clasping his lank hands first round one
knee, then round the other. The telescreen barked at him to keep still.
Time passed. Twenty minutes, an hour--it was difficult to judge. Once more
there was a sound of boots outside. Winston's entrails contracted. Soon,
very soon, perhaps in five minutes, perhaps now, the tramp of boots would
mean that his own turn had come.
The door opened. The cold-faced young officer stepped into the cell. With
a brief movement of the hand he indicated Ampleforth.
'Room 101,' he said.
Ampleforth marched clumsily out between the guards, his face vaguely
perturbed, but uncomprehending.
What seemed like a long time passed. The pain in Winston's belly had
revived. His mind sagged round and round on the same trick, like a ball
falling again and again into the same series of slots. He had only six
thoughts. The pain in his belly; a piece of bread; the blood and the
screaming; O'Brien; Julia; the razor blade. There was another spasm in his
entrails, the heavy boots were approaching. As the door opened, the wave
of air that it created brought in a powerful smell of cold sweat. Parsons
walked into the cell. He was wearing khaki shorts and a sports-shirt.
This time Winston was startled into self-forgetfulness.
'YOU here!' he said.
Parsons gave Winston a glance in which there was neither interest nor
surprise, but only misery. He began walking jerkily up and down, evidently
unable to keep still. Each time he straightened his pudgy knees it was
apparent that they were trembling. His eyes had a wide-open, staring look,
as though he could not prevent himself from gazing at something in the
middle distance.
'What are you in for?' said Winston.
'Thoughtcrime!' said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone of his voice
implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous
horror that such a word could be applied to himself. He paused opposite
Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: 'You don't think they'll shoot
me, do you, old chap? They don't shoot you if you haven't actually done
anything--only thoughts, which you can't help? I know they give you a fair
hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They'll know my record, won't they?
YOU know what kind of chap I was. Not a bad chap in my way. Not brainy, of
course, but keen. I tried to do my best for the Party, didn't I? I'll get
off with five years, don't you think? Or even ten years? A chap like me
could make himself pretty useful in a labour-camp. They wouldn't shoot me
for going off the rails just once?'
'Are you guilty?' said Winston.
'Of course I'm guilty!' cried Parsons with a servile glance at the
telescreen. 'You don't think the Party would arrest an innocent man,
do you?' His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly
sanctimonious expression. 'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,'
he said sententiously. 'It's insidious. It can get hold of you without
your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes,
that's a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit--never knew
I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my
sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?'
He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to
utter an obscenity.
'"Down with Big Brother!" Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again,
it seems. Between you and me, old man, I'm glad they got me before it went
any further. Do you know what I'm going to say to them when I go up before
the tribunal? "Thank you," I'm going to say, "thank you for saving me
before it was too late."'
'Who denounced you?' said Winston.
'It was my little daughter,' said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride.
'She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to
the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?
I don't bear her any grudge for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I
brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.'
He made a few more jerky movements up and down, several times, casting a
longing glance at the lavatory pan. Then he suddenly ripped down his
shorts.
'Excuse me, old man,' he said. 'I can't help it. It's the waiting.'
He plumped his large posterior into the lavatory pan. Winston covered his
face with his hands.
'Smith!' yelled the voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Uncover your
face. No faces covered in the cells.'
Winston uncovered his face. Parsons used the lavatory, loudly and
abundantly. It then turned out that the plug was defective and the cell
stank abominably for hours afterwards.
Parsons was removed. More prisoners came and went, mysteriously. One, a
woman, was consigned to 'Room 101', and, Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel
and turn a different colour when she heard the words. A time came when, if
it had been morning when he was brought here, it would be afternoon; or if
it had been afternoon, then it would be midnight. There were six prisoners
in the cell, men and women. All sat very still. Opposite Winston there sat
a man with a chinless, toothy face exactly like that of some large,
harmless rodent. His fat, mottled cheeks were so pouched at the bottom
that it was difficult not to believe that he had little stores of food
tucked away there. His pale-grey eyes flitted timorously from face to face
and turned quickly away again when he caught anyone's eye.
The door opened, and another prisoner was brought in whose appearance sent
a momentary chill through Winston. He was a commonplace, mean-looking man
who might have been an engineer or technician of some kind. But what was
startling was the emaciation of his face. It was like a skull. Because of
its thinness the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large, and the
eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or
something.
The man sat down on the bench at a little distance from Winston. Winston
did not look at him again, but the tormented, skull-like face was as
vivid in his mind as though it had been straight in front of his eyes.
Suddenly he realized what was the matter. The man was dying of starvation.
The same thought seemed to occur almost simultaneously to everyone in the
cell. There was a very faint stirring all the way round the bench. The
eyes of the chinless man kept flitting towards the skull-faced man, then
turning guiltily away, then being dragged back by an irresistible
attraction. Presently he began to fidget on his seat. At last he stood up,
waddled clumsily across the cell, dug down into the pocket of his overalls,
and, with an abashed air, held out a grimy piece of bread to the
skull-faced man.
There was a furious, deafening roar from the telescreen. The chinless man
jumped in his tracks. The skull-faced man had quickly thrust his hands
behind his back, as though demonstrating to all the world that he refused
the gift.
'Bumstead!' roared the voice. '2713 Bumstead J.! Let fall that piece of
bread!'
The chinless man dropped the piece of bread on the floor.
'Remain standing where you are,' said the voice. 'Face the door. Make no
movement.'
The chinless man obeyed. His large pouchy cheeks were quivering
uncontrollably. The door clanged open. As the young officer entered and
stepped aside, there emerged from behind him a short stumpy guard with
enormous arms and shoulders. He took his stand opposite the chinless man,
and then, at a signal from the officer, let free a frightful blow, with
all the weight of his body behind it, full in the chinless man's mouth.
The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the floor. His body
was flung across the cell and fetched up against the base of the lavatory
seat. For a moment he lay as though stunned, with dark blood oozing from
his mouth and nose. A very faint whimpering or squeaking, which seemed
unconscious, came out of him. Then he rolled over and raised himself
unsteadily on hands and knees. Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the two
halves of a dental plate fell out of his mouth.
The prisoners sat very still, their hands crossed on their knees. The
chinless man climbed back into his place. Down one side of his face the
flesh was darkening. His mouth had swollen into a shapeless cherry-coloured
mass with a black hole in the middle of it.
From time to time a little blood dripped on to the breast of his overalls.
His grey eyes still flitted from face to face, more guiltily than ever,
as though he were trying to discover how much the others despised him for
his humiliation.
The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indicated the
skull-faced man.
'Room 101,' he said.
There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston's side. The man had actually
flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hand clasped together.
'Comrade! Officer!' he cried. 'You don't have to take me to that place!
Haven't I told you everything already? What else is it you want to know?
There's nothing I wouldn't confess, nothing! Just tell me what it is and
I'll confess straight off. Write it down and I'll sign it--anything!
Not room 101!'
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man's face, already very pale, turned a colour Winston would not have
believed possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of green.
'Do anything to me!' he yelled. 'You've been starving me for weeks. Finish
it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five
years. Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is
and I'll tell you anything you want. I don't care who it is or what you do
to them. I've got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn't six
years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in
front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!'
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man looked frantically round at the other prisoners, as though with
some idea that he could put another victim in his own place. His eyes
settled on the smashed face of the chinless man. He flung out a lean arm.
'That's the one you ought to be taking, not me!' he shouted. 'You didn't
hear what he was saying after they bashed his face. Give me a chance and
I'll tell you every word of it. HE'S the one that's against the Party, not
me.' The guards stepped forward. The man's voice rose to a shriek. 'You
didn't hear him!' he repeated. 'Something went wrong with the telescreen.
HE'S the one you want. Take him, not me!'
The two sturdy guards had stooped to take him by the arms. But just at
this moment he flung himself across the floor of the cell and grabbed one
of the iron legs that supported the bench. He had set up a wordless
howling, like an animal. The guards took hold of him to wrench him loose,
but he clung on with astonishing strength. For perhaps twenty seconds
they were hauling at him. The prisoners sat quiet, their hands crossed on
their knees, looking straight in front of them. The howling stopped; the
man had no breath left for anything except hanging on. Then there was a
different kind of cry. A kick from a guard's boot had broken the fingers
of one of his hands. They dragged him to his feet.
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man was led out, walking unsteadily, with head sunken, nursing his
crushed hand, all the fight had gone out of him.
A long time passed. If it had been midnight when the skull-faced man was
taken away, it was morning: if morning, it was afternoon. Winston was
alone, and had been alone for hours. The pain of sitting on the narrow
bench was such that often he got up and walked about, unreproved by the
telescreen. The piece of bread still lay where the chinless man had
dropped it. At the beginning it needed a hard effort not to look at it,
but presently hunger gave way to thirst. His mouth was sticky and
evil-tasting. The humming sound and the unvarying white light induced a
sort of faintness, an empty feeling inside his head. He would get up
because the ache in his bones was no longer bearable, and then would sit
down again almost at once because he was too dizzy to make sure of
staying on his feet. Whenever his physical sensations were a little under
control the terror returned. Sometimes with a fading hope he thought of
O'Brien and the razor blade. It was thinkable that the razor blade might
arrive concealed in his food, if he were ever fed. More dimly he thought
of Julia. Somewhere or other she was suffering perhaps far worse than he.
She might be screaming with pain at this moment. He thought: 'If I could
save Julia by doubling my own pain, would I do it? Yes, I would.' But that
was merely an intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought
to take it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel anything,
except pain and foreknowledge of pain. Besides, was it possible, when you
were actually suffering it, to wish for any reason that your own pain
should increase? But that question was not answerable yet.
The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O'Brien came in.
Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had driven all
caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot the
presence of the telescreen.
'They've got you too!' he cried.
'They got me a long time ago,' said O'Brien with a mild, almost regretful
irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged a broad-chested
guard with a long black truncheon in his hand.
'You know this, Winston,' said O'Brien. 'Don't deceive yourself. You did
know it--you have always known it.'
Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no time to think of
that. All he had eyes for was the truncheon in the guard's hand. It might
fall anywhere; on the crown, on the tip of the ear, on the upper arm, on
the elbow----
The elbow! He had slumped to his knees, almost paralysed, clasping the
stricken elbow with his other hand. Everything had exploded into yellow
light. Inconceivable, inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain!
The light cleared and he could see the other two looking down at him. The
guard was laughing at his contortions. One question at any rate was
answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase
of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.
Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain
there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed
on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.
Chapter 2
He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except that it was
higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he
could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usual was falling on his
face. O'Brien was standing at his side, looking down at him intently. At
the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic
syringe.
Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings only gradually.
He had the impression of swimming up into this room from some quite
different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath it. How long he
had been down there he did not know. Since the moment when they arrested
him he had not seen darkness or daylight. Besides, his memories were not
continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of
consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again
after a blank interval. But whether the intervals were of days or weeks
or only seconds, there was no way of knowing.
With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had started. Later he was
to realize that all that then happened was merely a preliminary, a routine
interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected. There was a
long range of crimes--espionage, sabotage, and the like--to which everyone
had to confess as a matter of course. The confession was a formality,
though the torture was real. How many times he had been beaten, how long
the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there were five
or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it was
fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes
it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless
as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless
effort to dodge the kicks, and simply inviting more and yet more kicks,
in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin,
in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine. There were times
when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed
to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not
force himself into losing consciousness. There were times when his nerve
so forsook him that he began shouting for mercy even before the beating
began, when the mere sight of a fist drawn back for a blow was enough
to make him pour forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes. There
were other times when he started out with the resolve of confessing
nothing, when every word had to be forced out of him between gasps of
pain, and there were times when he feebly tried to compromise, when he
said to himself: 'I will confess, but not yet. I must hold out till the
pain becomes unbearable. Three more kicks, two more kicks, and then I will
tell them what they want.' Sometimes he was beaten till he could hardly
stand, then flung like a sack of potatoes on to the stone floor of a cell,
left to recuperate for a few hours, and then taken out and beaten again.
There were also longer periods of recovery. He remembered them dimly,
because they were spent chiefly in sleep or stupor. He remembered a cell
with a plank bed, a sort of shelf sticking out from the wall, and a tin
wash-basin, and meals of hot soup and bread and sometimes coffee. He
remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop his hair,
and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse,
tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over
him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make
him sleep.
The beatings grew less frequent, and became mainly a threat, a horror
to which he could be sent back at any moment when his answers were
unsatisfactory. His questioners now were not ruffians in black uniforms
but Party intellectuals, little rotund men with quick movements and
flashing spectacles, who worked on him in relays over periods which
lasted--he thought, he could not be sure--ten or twelve hours at a stretch.
These other questioners saw to it that he was in constant slight pain, but
it was not chiefly pain that they relied on. They slapped his face, wrung
his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to
urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water;
but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of
arguing and reasoning. Their real weapon was the merciless questioning
that went on and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for
him, twisting everything that he said, convicting him at every step of
lies and self-contradiction until he began weeping as much from shame as
from nervous fatigue. Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a
single session. Most of the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened
at every hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again; but sometimes
they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeal to him in
the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even
now he had not enough loyalty to the Party left to make him wish to
undo the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags after hours of
questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling tears. In the
end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and
fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that
signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out
what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the
bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party
members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public
funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that
he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian government as far back as
1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of
capitalism, and a sexual pervert. He confessed that he had murdered his
wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife
was still alive. He confessed that for years he had been in personal touch
with Goldstein and had been a member of an underground organization which
had included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to
confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all
true. It was true that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes
of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed.
There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in his mind
disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all round them.
He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light, because he
could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near at hand some kind of
instrument was ticking slowly and regularly. The eyes grew larger and more
luminous. Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes, and
was swallowed up.
He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, under dazzling lights.
A man in a white coat was reading the dials. There was a tramp of heavy
boots outside. The door clanged open. The waxed-faced officer marched in,
followed by two guards.
'Room 101,' said the officer.
The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not look at Winston
either; he was looking only at the dials.
He was rolling down a mighty corridor, a kilometre wide, full of glorious,
golden light, roaring with laughter and shouting out confessions at the
top of his voice. He was confessing everything, even the things he had
succeeded in holding back under the torture. He was relating the entire
history of his life to an audience who knew it already. With him were the
guards, the other questioners, the men in white coats, O'Brien, Julia,
Mr Charrington, all rolling down the corridor together and shouting with
laughter. Some dreadful thing which had lain embedded in the future had
somehow been skipped over and had not happened. Everything was all right,
there was no more pain, the last detail of his life was laid bare,
understood, forgiven.
He was starting up from the plank bed in the half-certainty that he had
heard O'Brien's voice. All through his interrogation, although he had
never seen him, he had had the feeling that O'Brien was at his elbow, just
out of sight. It was O'Brien who was directing everything. It was he who
set the guards on to Winston and who prevented them from killing him. It
was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should
have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the
drugs should be pumped into his arm. It was he who asked the questions and
suggested the answers. He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was
the inquisitor, he was the friend. And once--Winston could not remember
whether it was in drugged sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in a moment
of wakefulness--a voice murmured in his ear: 'Don't worry, Winston; you
are in my keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the
turning-point has come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.' He
was not sure whether it was O'Brien's voice; but it was the same voice
that had said to him, 'We shall meet in the place where there is no
darkness,' in that other dream, seven years ago.
He did not remember any ending to his interrogation. There was a period of
blackness and then the cell, or room, in which he now was had gradually
materialized round him. He was almost flat on his back, and unable to move.
His body was held down at every essential point. Even the back of his head
was gripped in some manner. O'Brien was looking down at him gravely and
rather sadly. His face, seen from below, looked coarse and worn, with
pouches under the eyes and tired lines from nose to chin. He was older
than Winston had thought him; he was perhaps forty-eight or fifty. Under
his hand there was a dial with a lever on top and figures running round
the face.
'I told you,' said O'Brien, 'that if we met again it would be here.'
'Yes,' said Winston.
Without any warning except a slight movement of O'Brien's hand, a wave of
pain flooded his body. It was a frightening pain, because he could not see
what was happening, and he had the feeling that some mortal injury was
being done to him. He did not know whether the thing was really happening,
or whether the effect was electrically produced; but his body was being
wrenched out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart. Although
the pain had brought the sweat out on his forehead, the worst of all was
the fear that his backbone was about to snap. He set his teeth and
breathed hard through his nose, trying to keep silent as long as possible.
'You are afraid,' said O'Brien, watching his face, 'that in another moment
something is going to break. Your especial fear is that it will be your
backbone. You have a vivid mental picture of the vertebrae snapping apart
and the spinal fluid dripping out of them. That is what you are thinking,
is it not, Winston?'
Winston did not answer. O'Brien drew back the lever on the dial. The wave
of pain receded almost as quickly as it had come.
'That was forty,' said O'Brien. 'You can see that the numbers on this dial
run up to a hundred. Will you please remember, throughout our conversation,
that I have it in my power to inflict pain on you at any moment and to
whatever degree I choose? If you tell me any lies, or attempt to
prevaricate in any way, or even fall below your usual level of
intelligence, you will cry out with pain, instantly. Do you understand
that?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien's manner became less severe. He resettled his spectacles
thoughtfully, and took a pace or two up and down. When he spoke his voice
was gentle and patient. He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a
priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish.
'I am taking trouble with you, Winston,' he said, 'because you are worth
trouble. You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have
known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are
mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to
remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other
events which never happened. Fortunately it is curable. You have never
cured yourself of it, because you did not choose to. There was a small
effort of the will that you were not ready to make. Even now, I am well
aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is
a virtue. Now we will take an example. At this moment, which power is
Oceania at war with?'
'When I was arrested, Oceania was at war with Eastasia.'
'With Eastasia. Good. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia,
has it not?'
Winston drew in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak and then did not
speak. He could not take his eyes away from the dial.
'The truth, please, Winston. YOUR truth. Tell me what you think you
remember.'
'I remember that until only a week before I was arrested, we were not at
war with Eastasia at all. We were in alliance with them. The war was
against Eurasia. That had lasted for four years. Before that----'
O'Brien stopped him with a movement of the hand.
'Another example,' he said. 'Some years ago you had a very serious delusion
indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time Party members named
Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford--men who were executed for treachery and
sabotage after making the fullest possible confession--were not guilty of
the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen
unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were
false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination.
You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a
photograph something like this.'
An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O'Brien's fingers. For
perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston's vision. It was
a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was THE
photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and
Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon
eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before
his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it,
unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to
wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as
a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the
dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at
least to see it.
'It exists!' he cried.
'No,' said O'Brien.
He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall.
O'Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling
away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame.
O'Brien turned away from the wall.
'Ashes,' he said. 'Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist.
It never existed.'
'But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it.
You remember it.'
'I do not remember it,' said O'Brien.
Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly
helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it
would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien
had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have
forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of
forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps
that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the
thought that defeated him.
O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the
air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.
'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,' he said.
'Repeat it, if you please.'
'"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past,"' repeated Winston obediently.
'"Who controls the present controls the past,"' said O'Brien, nodding his
head with slow approval. 'Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has
real existence?'
Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted
towards the dial. He not only did not know whether 'yes' or 'no' was the
answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he
believed to be the true one.
O'Brien smiled faintly. 'You are no metaphysician, Winston,' he said.
'Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I
will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is
there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past
is still happening?'
'No.'
'Then where does the past exist, if at all?'
'In records. It is written down.'
'In records. And----?'
'In the mind. In human memories.'
'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we
control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?'
'But how can you stop people remembering things?' cried Winston again
momentarily forgetting the dial. 'It is involuntary. It is outside oneself.
How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!'
O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
'On the contrary,' he said, 'YOU have not controlled it. That is what has
brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in
self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the
price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the
disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is
something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe
that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into
thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the
same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual
mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the
mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party
holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by
looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got
to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the
will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.'
He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying to
sink in.
'Do you remember,' he went on, 'writing in your diary, "Freedom is the
freedom to say that two plus two make four"?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb
hidden and the four fingers extended.
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'Four.'
'And if the party says that it is not four but five--then how many?'
'Four.'
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to
fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore
into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his
teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still
extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly
eased.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four.'
The needle went up to sixty.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy,
stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up
before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate,
but unmistakably four.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Five! Five! Five!'
'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are
four. How many fingers, please?'
'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!'
Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brien's arm round his shoulders. He had
perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his
body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably,
his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a
moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy
arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector,
that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source,
and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it.
'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.
'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front
of my eyes? Two and two are four.'
'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three.
Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not
easy to become sane.'
He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbs tightened again,
but the pain had ebbed away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him
merely weak and cold. O'Brien motioned with his head to the man in the
white coat, who had stood immobile throughout the proceedings. The man in
the white coat bent down and looked closely into Winston's eyes, felt his
pulse, laid an ear against his chest, tapped here and there, then he
nodded to O'Brien.
'Again,' said O'Brien.
The pain flowed into Winston's body. The needle must be at seventy,
seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers
were still there, and still four. All that mattered was somehow to stay
alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whether he was
crying out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O'Brien
had drawn back the lever.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying
to see five.'
'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see
them?'
'Really to see them.'
'Again,' said O'Brien.
Perhaps the needle was eighty--ninety. Winston could not intermittently
remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a
forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and
out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying
to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was
impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious
identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened
his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing.
Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in
either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again.
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'I don't know. I don't know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four,
five, six--in all honesty I don't know.'
'Better,' said O'Brien.
A needle slid into Winston's arm. Almost in the same instant a blissful,
healing warmth spread all through his body. The pain was already
half-forgotten. He opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O'Brien.
At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligent, his heart
seemed to turn over. If he could have moved he would have stretched out
a hand and laid it on O'Brien's arm. He had never loved him so deeply as
at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old
feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O'Brien was a friend
or an enemy, had come back. O'Brien was a person who could be talked to.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. O'Brien
had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was
certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference. In some
sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates: somewhere or
other, although the actual words might never be spoken, there was a place
where they could meet and talk. O'Brien was looking down at him with an
expression which suggested that the same thought might be in his own mind.
When he spoke it was in an easy, conversational tone.
'Do you know where you are, Winston?' he said.
'I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.'
'Do you know how long you have been here?'
'I don't know. Days, weeks, months--I think it is months.'
'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?'
'To make them confess.'
'No, that is not the reason. Try again.'
'To punish them.'
'No!' exclaimed O'Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his
face had suddenly become both stern and animated. 'No! Not merely to
extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have
brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand,
Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands
uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have
committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is
all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.
Do you understand what I mean by that?'
He was bending over Winston. His face looked enormous because of its
nearness, and hideously ugly because it was seen from below. Moreover it
was filled with a sort of exaltation, a lunatic intensity. Again Winston's
heart shrank. If it had been possible he would have cowered deeper into
the bed. He felt certain that O'Brien was about to twist the dial out of
sheer wantonness. At this moment, however, O'Brien turned away. He took a
pace or two up and down. Then he continued less vehemently:
'The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no
martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In
the Middle Ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out
to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it
burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because
the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while
they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they were
unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true
beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame
to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there
were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis
and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly
than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned
from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not
make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they
deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down
by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches,
confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with
abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy.
And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again.
The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once
again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they
had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of
that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make
them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us.
You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston.
Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the
stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the
stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not
a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well
as in the future. You will never have existed.'
Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with a momentary
bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as though Winston had uttered the
thought aloud. His large ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little
narrowed.
'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we intend to destroy you utterly,
so that nothing that you say or do can make the smallest difference--in
that case, why do we go to the trouble of interrogating you first? That is
what you were thinking, was it not?'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien smiled slightly. 'You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are
a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are
different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with
negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally
you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy
the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never
destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.
We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our
side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of
ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous
thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless
it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In
the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming
his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could
carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage
waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it
out. The command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The command
of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt". Our command is "THOU ART". No one
whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed
clean. Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once
believed--Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford--in the end we broke them down.
I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down,
whimpering, grovelling, weeping--and in the end it was not with pain or
fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished with them they were
only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for
what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see
how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die
while their minds were still clean.'
His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic enthusiasm,
was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston, he is not a
hypocrite, he believes every word he says. What most oppressed him was the
consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched the heavy
yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his
vision. O'Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no
idea that he had ever had, or could have, that O'Brien had not long ago
known, examined, and rejected. His mind CONTAINED Winston's mind. But
in that case how could it be true that O'Brien was mad? It must be he,
Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had
grown stern again.
'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely
you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And
even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still
you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever.
Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from
which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you
could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be
capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you.
Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living,
or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow.
We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.'
He paused and signed to the man in the white coat. Winston was aware of
some heavy piece of apparatus being pushed into place behind his head.
O'Brien had sat down beside the bed, so that his face was almost on a
level with Winston's.
'Three thousand,' he said, speaking over Winston's head to the man in the
white coat.
Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against
Winston's temples. He quailed. There was pain coming, a new kind of pain.
O'Brien laid a hand reassuringly, almost kindly, on his.
'This time it will not hurt,' he said. 'Keep your eyes fixed on mine.'
At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like an
explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There
was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only
prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing
happened, he had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that
position. A terrific painless blow had flattened him out. Also something
had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he
remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was
gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there was a large patch of
emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.
'It will not last,' said O'Brien. 'Look me in the eyes. What country is
Oceania at war with?'
Winston thought. He knew what was meant by Oceania and that he himself was
a citizen of Oceania. He also remembered Eurasia and Eastasia; but who was
at war with whom he did not know. In fact he had not been aware that there
was any war.
'I don't remember.'
'Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that now?'
'Yes.'
'Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your
life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history,
the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you
remember that?'
'Yes.'
'Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been
condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece
of paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paper ever existed.
You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the
very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?'
'Yes.'
'Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers.
Do you remember that?'
'Yes.'
O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?'
'Yes.'
And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his
mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then
everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the
bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment--he did
not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps--of luminous certainty, when
each new suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and
become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as
easily as five, if that were what was needed. It had faded but before
O'Brien had dropped his hand; but though he could not recapture it, he
could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some period of
one's life when one was in effect a different person.
'You see now,' said O'Brien, 'that it is at any rate possible.'
'Yes,' said Winston.
O'Brien stood up with a satisfied air. Over to his left Winston saw the
man in the white coat break an ampoule and draw back the plunger of a
syringe. O'Brien turned to Winston with a smile. In almost the old manner
he resettled his spectacles on his nose.
'Do you remember writing in your diary,' he said, 'that it did not matter
whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who
understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to
you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you
happen to be insane. Before we bring the session to an end you can ask me
a few questions, if you choose.'
'Any question I like?'
'Anything.' He saw that Winston's eyes were upon the dial. 'It is switched
off. What is your first question?'
'What have you done with Julia?' said Winston.
O'Brien smiled again. 'She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately--unreservedly.
I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly
recognize her if you saw her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her
folly, her dirty-mindedness--everything has been burned out of her. It was
a perfect conversion, a textbook case.'
'You tortured her?'
O'Brien left this unanswered. 'Next question,' he said.
'Does Big Brother exist?'
'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of
the Party.'
'Does he exist in the same way as I exist?'
'You do not exist,' said O'Brien.
Once again the sense of helplessness assailed him. He knew, or he could
imagine, the arguments which proved his own nonexistence; but they were
nonsense, they were only a play on words. Did not the statement, 'You do
not exist', contain a logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so?
His mind shrivelled as he thought of the unanswerable, mad arguments with
which O'Brien would demolish him.
'I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity.
I was born and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular
point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point
simultaneously. In that sense, does Big Brother exist?'
'It is of no importance. He exists.'
'Will Big Brother ever die?'
'Of course not. How could he die? Next question.'
'Does the Brotherhood exist?'
'That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we
have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you
will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long
as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.'
Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little faster. He still had
not asked the question that had come into his mind the first. He had got
to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue would not utter it. There
was a trace of amusement in O'Brien's face. Even his spectacles seemed to
wear an ironical gleam. He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows what
I am going to ask! At the thought the words burst out of him:
'What is in Room 101?'
The expression on O'Brien's face did not change. He answered drily:
'You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in
Room 101.'
He raised a finger to the man in the white coat. Evidently the session was
at an end. A needle jerked into Winston's arm. He sank almost instantly
into deep sleep.
Chapter 3
'There are three stages in your reintegration,' said O'Brien. 'There is
learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for
you to enter upon the second stage.'
As always, Winston was lying flat on his back. But of late his bonds were
looser. They still held him to the bed, but he could move his knees a
little and could turn his head from side to side and raise his arms from
the elbow. The dial, also, had grown to be less of a terror. He could
evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he
showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever. Sometimes they got through
a whole session without use of the dial. He could not remember how many
sessions there had been. The whole process seemed to stretch out over a
long, indefinite time--weeks, possibly--and the intervals between the
sessions might sometimes have been days, sometimes only an hour or two.
'As you lie there,' said O'Brien, 'you have often wondered--you have even
asked me--why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble
on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially
the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived
in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary,
"I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY"? It was when you thought about
"why" that you doubted your own sanity. You have read THE BOOK,
Goldstein's book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that
you did not know already?'
'You have read it?' said Winston.
'I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is
produced individually, as you know.'
'Is it true, what it says?'
'As description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret
accumulation of knowledge--a gradual spread of enlightenment--ultimately
a proletarian rebellion--the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw yourself
that that was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians will
never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do
not have to tell you the reason: you know it already. If you have ever
cherished any dreams of violent insurrection, you must abandon them. There
is no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is
for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.'
He came closer to the bed. 'For ever!' he repeated. 'And now let us get
back to the question of "how" and "why". You understand well enough HOW
the Party maintains itself in power. Now tell me WHY we cling to power.
What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak,' he added as
Winston remained silent.
Nevertheless Winston did not speak for another moment or two. A feeling of
weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come
back into O'Brien's face. He knew in advance what O'Brien would say. That
the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of
the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail,
cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and
must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger
than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and
happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.
That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect
doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of
others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that
when O'Brien said this he would believe it. You could see it in his face.
O'Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what
the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings
lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had
understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was
justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston,
against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your
arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
'You are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly. 'You believe
that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore----'
He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body.
O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.
'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should know better than
to say a thing like that.'
He pulled the lever back and continued:
'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party
seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good
of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long
life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will
understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the
past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who
resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the
Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never
had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps
they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a
limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where
human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that
no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is
not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order
to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish
the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of
torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to
understand me?'
Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of
O'Brien's face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of
intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself
helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin
sagged from the cheekbones. O'Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing
the worn face nearer.
'You are thinking,' he said, 'that my face is old and tired. You are
thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the
decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual
is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.
Do you die when you cut your fingernails?'
He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand
in his pocket.
'We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But at present
power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to
gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize
is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as
he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is
Slavery". Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is
freedom. Alone--free--the human being is always defeated. It must be so,
because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all
failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape
from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the
Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to
realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body--but, above
all, over the mind. Power over matter--external reality, as you would call
it--is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.'
For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise
himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his
body painfully.
'But how can you control matter?' he burst out. 'You don't even control
the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death----'
O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. 'We control matter because
we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by
degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility,
levitation--anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if
I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must
get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We
make the laws of Nature.'
'But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about
Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.'
'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not,
what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania
is the world.'
'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny--helpless!
How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was
uninhabited.'
'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older?
Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'
'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and
mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever
heard of.'
'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century
biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he
could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is
nothing.'
'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are
a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.'
'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire
a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could
blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the
stars go round it.'
Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say
anything. O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:
'For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the
ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to
assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions
upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is
beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near
or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians
are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?'
Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer
crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he KNEW, that he was in the
right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind--surely there
must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been
exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he
had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's mouth as
he looked down at him.
'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong
point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are
mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But
that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a
digression,' he added in a different tone. 'The real power, the power we
have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.'
He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster
questioning a promising pupil: 'How does one man assert his power over
another, Winston?'
Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.
'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is
suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his
own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing
human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of
your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are
creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that
the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a
world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not
less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will
be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they
were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world
there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.
Everything else we shall destroy--everything. Already we are breaking down
the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We
have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and
between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend
any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.
Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from
a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual
formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm.
Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except
loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of
Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over
a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When
we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be
no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity,
no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be
destroyed. But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be
the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing
subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory,
the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a
picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever.'
He paused as though he expected Winston to speak. Winston had tried to
shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything.
His heart seemed to be frozen. O'Brien went on:
'And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be
stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so
that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you
have undergone since you have been in our hands--all that will continue,
and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the
executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of
terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the
less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the
despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at
every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and
yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you
during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after
generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here
at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible--and in the end
utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own
accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of
victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless
pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning,
I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you
will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become
part of it.'
Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. 'You can't!' he said
weakly.
'What do you mean by that remark, Winston?'
'You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a
dream. It is impossible.'
'Why?'
'It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty.
It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit
suicide.'
'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting
than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that
make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we
quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what
difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the
individual is not death? The party is immortal.'
As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he
was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O'Brien would twist
the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without
arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of
what O'Brien had said, he returned to the attack.
'I don't know--I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat
you. Life will defeat you.'
'We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there
is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and
will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely
malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the
proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your
mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The
others are outside--irrelevant.'
'I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will
see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.'
'Do you see any evidence that that is happening? Or any reason why it
should?'
'No. I believe it. I KNOW that you will fail. There is something in the
universe--I don't know, some spirit, some principle--that you will never
overcome.'
'Do you believe in God, Winston?'
'No.'
'Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?'
'I don't know. The spirit of Man.'
'And do you consider yourself a man?'
'Yes.'
'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we
are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are ALONE? You are outside
history, you are non-existent.' His manner changed and he said more
harshly: 'And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies
and our cruelty?'
'Yes, I consider myself superior.'
O'Brien did not speak. Two other voices were speaking. After a moment
Winston recognized one of them as his own. It was a sound-track of the
conversation he had had with O'Brien, on the night when he had enrolled
himself in the Brotherhood. He heard himself promising to lie, to steal,
to forge, to murder, to encourage drug-taking and prostitution, to
disseminate venereal diseases, to throw vitriol in a child's face. O'Brien
made a small impatient gesture, as though to say that the demonstration
was hardly worth making. Then he turned a switch and the voices stopped.
'Get up from that bed,' he said.
The bonds had loosened themselves. Winston lowered himself to the floor
and stood up unsteadily.
'You are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the guardian of the human
spirit. You shall see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes.'
Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip
fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. He could not remember
whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at
one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish
rags, just recognizable as the remnants of underclothes. As he slid
them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far
end of the room. He approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry
had broken out of him.
'Go on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall
see the side view as well.'
He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, grey-coloured,
skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was
frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He
moved closer to the glass. The creature's face seemed to be protruded,
because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird's face with a nobby
forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose, and
battered-looking cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful.
The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was
his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had
changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the
ones he felt. He had gone partially bald. For the first moment he had
thought that he had gone grey as well, but it was only the scalp that was
grey. Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body was grey all
over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here and there under the dirt there
were the red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an
inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it. But the truly frightening
thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow
as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker
than the thighs. He saw now what O'Brien had meant about seeing the side
view. The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were
hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck
seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he
would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from
some malignant disease.
'You have thought sometimes,' said O'Brien, 'that my face--the face of a
member of the Inner Party--looks old and worn. What do you think of your
own face?'
He seized Winston's shoulder and spun him round so that he was facing him.
'Look at the condition you are in!' he said. 'Look at this filthy grime
all over your body. Look at the dirt between your toes. Look at that
disgusting running sore on your leg. Do you know that you stink like a
goat? Probably you have ceased to notice it. Look at your emaciation. Do
you see? I can make my thumb and forefinger meet round your bicep. I could
snap your neck like a carrot. Do you know that you have lost twenty-five
kilograms since you have been in our hands? Even your hair is coming out
in handfuls. Look!' He plucked at Winston's head and brought away a tuft
of hair. 'Open your mouth. Nine, ten, eleven teeth left. How many had you
when you came to us? And the few you have left are dropping out of your
head. Look here!'
He seized one of Winston's remaining front teeth between his powerful
thumb and forefinger. A twinge of pain shot through Winston's jaw. O'Brien
had wrenched the loose tooth out by the roots. He tossed it across the
cell.
'You are rotting away,' he said; 'you are falling to pieces. What are you?
A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you
see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is
humanity. Now put your clothes on again.'
Winston began to dress himself with slow stiff movements. Until now he had
not seemed to notice how thin and weak he was. Only one thought stirred in
his mind: that he must have been in this place longer than he had imagined.
Then suddenly as he fixed the miserable rags round himself a feeling of
pity for his ruined body overcame him. Before he knew what he was doing
he had collapsed on to a small stool that stood beside the bed and burst
into tears. He was aware of his ugliness, his gracelessness, a bundle of
bones in filthy underclothes sitting weeping in the harsh white light: but
he could not stop himself. O'Brien laid a hand on his shoulder, almost
kindly.
'It will not last for ever,' he said. 'You can escape from it whenever you
choose. Everything depends on yourself.'
'You did it!' sobbed Winston. 'You reduced me to this state.'
'No, Winston, you reduced yourself to it. This is what you accepted when
you set yourself up against the Party. It was all contained in that first
act. Nothing has happened that you did not foresee.'
He paused, and then went on:
'We have beaten you, Winston. We have broken you up. You have seen what
your body is like. Your mind is in the same state. I do not think there
can be much pride left in you. You have been kicked and flogged and
insulted, you have screamed with pain, you have rolled on the floor in
your own blood and vomit. You have whimpered for mercy, you have betrayed
everybody and everything. Can you think of a single degradation that has
not happened to you?'
Winston had stopped weeping, though the tears were still oozing out of his
eyes. He looked up at O'Brien.
'I have not betrayed Julia,' he said.
O'Brien looked down at him thoughtfully. 'No,' he said; 'no; that is
perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.'
The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy,
flooded Winston's heart again. How intelligent, he thought, how
intelligent! Never did O'Brien fail to understand what was said to him.
Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly that he HAD betrayed
Julia. For what was there that they had not screwed out of him under the
torture? He had told them everything he knew about her, her habits, her
character, her past life; he had confessed in the most trivial detail
everything that had happened at their meetings, all that he had said to
her and she to him, their black-market meals, their adulteries, their
vague plottings against the Party--everything. And yet, in the sense in
which he intended the word, he had not betrayed her. He had not stopped
loving her; his feelings towards her had remained the same. O'Brien had
seen what he meant without the need for explanation.
'Tell me,' he said, 'how soon will they shoot me?'
'It might be a long time,' said O'Brien. 'You are a difficult case. But
don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall
shoot you.'
Chapter 4
He was much better. He was growing fatter and stronger every day, if it
was proper to speak of days.
The white light and the humming sound were the same as ever, but the cell
was a little more comfortable than the others he had been in. There was a
pillow and a mattress on the plank bed, and a stool to sit on. They had
given him a bath, and they allowed him to wash himself fairly frequently
in a tin basin. They even gave him warm water to wash with. They had given
him new underclothes and a clean suit of overalls. They had dressed his
varicose ulcer with soothing ointment. They had pulled out the remnants
of his teeth and given him a new set of dentures.
Weeks or months must have passed. It would have been possible now to keep
count of the passage of time, if he had felt any interest in doing so,
since he was being fed at what appeared to be regular intervals. He was
getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he
wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food
was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once there was even
a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but the never-speaking guard
who brought his food would give him a light. The first time he tried to
smoke it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out for
a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal.
They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied to the
corner. At first he made no use of it. Even when he was awake he was
completely torpid. Often he would lie from one meal to the next almost
without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes waking into vague reveries
in which it was too much trouble to open his eyes. He had long grown
used to sleeping with a strong light on his face. It seemed to make no
difference, except that one's dreams were more coherent. He dreamed a
great deal all through this time, and they were always happy dreams. He
was in the Golden Country, or he was sitting among enormous glorious,
sunlit ruins, with his mother, with Julia, with O'Brien--not doing
anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things. Such
thoughts as he had when he was awake were mostly about his dreams. He
seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the
stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no desire
for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten
or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was
completely satisfying.
By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still felt no
impulse to get off the bed. All he cared for was to lie quiet and feel the
strength gathering in his body. He would finger himself here and there,
trying to make sure that it was not an illusion that his muscles were
growing rounder and his skin tauter. Finally it was established beyond a
doubt that he was growing fatter; his thighs were now definitely thicker
than his knees. After that, reluctantly at first, he began exercising
himself regularly. In a little while he could walk three kilometres,
measured by pacing the cell, and his bowed shoulders were growing
straighter. He attempted more elaborate exercises, and was astonished and
humiliated to find what things he could not do. He could not move out of a
walk, he could not hold his stool out at arm's length, he could not stand
on one leg without falling over. He squatted down on his heels, and found
that with agonizing pains in thigh and calf he could just lift himself to
a standing position. He lay flat on his belly and tried to lift his weight
by his hands. It was hopeless, he could not raise himself a centimetre.
But after a few more days--a few more mealtimes--even that feat was
accomplished. A time came when he could do it six times running. He began
to grow actually proud of his body, and to cherish an intermittent belief
that his face also was growing back to normal. Only when he chanced to put
his hand on his bald scalp did he remember the seamed, ruined face that
had looked back at him out of the mirror.
His mind grew more active. He sat down on the plank bed, his back against
the wall and the slate on his knees, and set to work deliberately at the
task of re-educating himself.
He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now, he had
been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision. From the
moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love--and yes, even during those
minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while the iron voice from the
telescreen told them what to do--he had grasped the frivolity, the
shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power of the
Party. He knew now that for seven years the Thought Police had watched him
like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word
spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had
not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his
diary they had carefully replaced. They had played sound-tracks to him,
shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia and himself.
Yes, even... He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides,
the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal,
collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check
its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of
learning to think as they thought. Only----!
The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down
the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy
capitals:
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:
TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE
But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though shying away from
something, seemed unable to concentrate. He knew that he knew what came
next, but for the moment he could not recall it. When he did recall it,
it was only by consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not come
of its own accord. He wrote:
GOD IS POWER
He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been
altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war
with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes
they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved
their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered
remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of
self-deception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else
followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards
however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and
go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except
your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly
knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except----!
Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The
law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could
float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he
THINKS he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously THINK I see him
do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage
breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't
really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought
under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere
or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things
happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of
anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind.
Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger
of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to
have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a
dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic,
instinctive. CRIMESTOP, they called it in Newspeak.
He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with
propositions--'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that
ice is heavier than water'--and trained himself in not seeing or not
understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy.
It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical
problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make
five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of
athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate
use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical
errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to
attain.
All the while, with one part of his mind, he wondered how soon they would
shoot him. 'Everything depends on yourself,' O'Brien had said; but he knew
that there was no conscious act by which he could bring it nearer. It
might be ten minutes hence, or ten years. They might keep him for years in
solitary confinement, they might send him to a labour-camp, they might
release him for a while, as they sometimes did. It was perfectly possible
that before he was shot the whole drama of his arrest and interrogation
would be enacted all over again. The one certain thing was that death
never came at an expected moment. The tradition--the unspoken tradition:
somehow you knew it, though you never heard it said--was that they shot
you from behind; always in the back of the head, without warning, as you
walked down a corridor from cell to cell.
One day--but 'one day' was not the right expression; just as probably it
was in the middle of the night: once--he fell into a strange, blissful
reverie. He was walking down the corridor, waiting for the bullet. He knew
that it was coming in another moment. Everything was settled, smoothed
out, reconciled. There were no more doubts, no more arguments, no more
pain, no more fear. His body was healthy and strong. He walked easily,
with a joy of movement and with a feeling of walking in sunlight. He was
not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love, he
was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down which he had
seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He was in the Golden
Country, following the foot-track across the old rabbit-cropped pasture.
He could feel the short springy turf under his feet and the gentle sunshine
on his face. At the edge of the field were the elm trees, faintly stirring,
and somewhere beyond that was the stream where the dace lay in the green
pools under the willows.
Suddenly he started up with a shock of horror. The sweat broke out on his
backbone. He had heard himself cry aloud:
'Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!'
For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence. She
had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she
had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far
more than he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he knew
that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
He lay back on the bed and tried to compose himself. What had he done? How
many years had he added to his servitude by that moment of weakness?
In another moment he would hear the tramp of boots outside. They could not
let such an outburst go unpunished. They would know now, if they had not
known before, that he was breaking the agreement he had made with them.
He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old days he had
hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had
retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped
to keep the inner heart inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but
he preferred to be in the wrong. They would understand that--O'Brien would
understand it. It was all confessed in that single foolish cry.
He would have to start all over again. It might take years. He ran a hand
over his face, trying to familiarize himself with the new shape. There
were deep furrows in the cheeks, the cheekbones felt sharp, the nose
flattened. Besides, since last seeing himself in the glass he had been
given a complete new set of teeth. It was not easy to preserve
inscrutability when you did not know what your face looked like. In any
case, mere control of the features was not enough. For the first time he
perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from
yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is
needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape
that could be given a name. From now onwards he must not only think right;
he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred
locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and
yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.
One day they would decide to shoot him. You could not tell when it would
happen, but a few seconds beforehand it should be possible to guess. It
was always from behind, walking down a corridor. Ten seconds would be
enough. In that time the world inside him could turn over. And then
suddenly, without a word uttered, without a check in his step, without the
changing of a line in his face--suddenly the camouflage would be down and
bang! would go the batteries of his hatred. Hatred would fill him like an
enormous roaring flame. And almost in the same instant bang! would go the
bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces
before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished,
unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in
their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.
He shut his eyes. It was more difficult than accepting an intellectual
discipline. It was a question of degrading himself, mutilating himself. He
had got to plunge into the filthiest of filth. What was the most horrible,
sickening thing of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous face
(because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as
being a metre wide), with its heavy black moustache and the eyes that
followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of its own accord.
What were his true feelings towards Big Brother?
There was a heavy tramp of boots in the passage. The steel door swung open
with a clang. O'Brien walked into the cell. Behind him were the waxen-faced
officer and the black-uniformed guards.
'Get up,' said O'Brien. 'Come here.'
Winston stood opposite him. O'Brien took Winston's shoulders between his
strong hands and looked at him closely.
'You have had thoughts of deceiving me,' he said. 'That was stupid.
Stand up straighter. Look me in the face.'
He paused, and went on in a gentler tone:
'You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong with you.
It is only emotionally that you have failed to make progress. Tell me,
Winston--and remember, no lies: you know that I am always able to detect
a lie--tell me, what are your true feelings towards Big Brother?'
'I hate him.'
'You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step.
You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love
him.'
He released Winston with a little push towards the guards.
'Room 101,' he said.
Chapter 5
At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know,
whereabouts he was in the windowless building. Possibly there were slight
differences in the air pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him
were below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated by
O'Brien was high up near the roof. This place was many metres underground,
as deep down as it was possible to go.
It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But he hardly noticed
his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were two small tables
straight in front of him, each covered with green baize. One was only a
metre or two from him, the other was further away, near the door. He was
strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not
even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to
look straight in front of him.
For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O'Brien came in.
'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that
you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in
Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'
The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire,
a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because
of the position in which O'Brien was standing. Winston could not see what
the thing was.
'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to
individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or
by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some
quite trivial thing, not even fatal.'
He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of
the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top
for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked
like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three
or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided
lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature
in each. They were rats.
'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world happens to be
rats.'
A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had
passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage.
But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it
suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.
'You can't do that!' he cried out in a high cracked voice. 'You couldn't,
you couldn't! It's impossible.'
'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that used to occur
in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a
roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side
of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it
into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.'
'O'Brien!' said Winston, making an effort to control his voice. 'You know
this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?'
O'Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish
manner that he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the
distance, as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind
Winston's back.
'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always enough. There are occasions when
a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death.
But for everyone there is something unendurable--something that cannot be
contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling
from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up
from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is
merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the
rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you
cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of
you.'
'But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don't know what it is?'
O'Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the nearer table.
He set it down carefully on the baize cloth. Winston could hear the blood
singing in his ears. He had the feeling of sitting in utter loneliness.
He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with
sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances.
Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres away from him. They were
enormous rats. They were at the age when a rat's muzzle grows blunt and
fierce and his fur brown instead of grey.
'The rat,' said O'Brien, still addressing his invisible audience,
'although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have
heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town. In some
streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five
minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they
will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They
show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.'
There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed to reach Winston
from far away. The rats were fighting; they were trying to get at each
other through the partition. He heard also a deep groan of despair.
That, too, seemed to come from outside himself.
O'Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed something in it.
There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself
loose from the chair. It was hopeless; every part of him, even his head,
was held immovably. O'Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a
metre from Winston's face.
'I have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You understand the
construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no
exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up.
These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever
seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore
straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they
burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.'
The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of
shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But
he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with a
split second left--to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty
odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of
nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone
black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out
of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save
himself. He must interpose another human being, the BODY of another human
being, between himself and the rats.
The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of
anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The
rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down, the
other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink
hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could see
the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him.
He was blind, helpless, mindless.
'It was a common punishment in Imperial China,' said O'Brien as
didactically as ever.
The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then--no,
it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps
too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was
just ONE person to whom he could transfer his punishment--ONE body that he
could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically,
over and over.
'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do
to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!'
He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was
still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through
the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through
the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars--always
away, away, away from the rats. He was light years distant, but O'Brien
was still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of wire
against his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard
another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and
not open.
Chapter 6
The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a
window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A
tinny music trickled from the telescreens.
Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass. Now and again
he glanced up at a vast face which eyed him from the opposite wall.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said. Unbidden, a waiter came and
filled his glass up with Victory Gin, shaking into it a few drops from
another bottle with a quill through the cork. It was saccharine flavoured
with cloves, the speciality of the cafe.
Winston was listening to the telescreen. At present only music was coming
out of it, but there was a possibility that at any moment there might be
a special bulletin from the Ministry of Peace. The news from the African
front was disquieting in the extreme. On and off he had been worrying
about it all day. A Eurasian army (Oceania was at war with Eurasia:
Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia) was moving southward at
terrifying speed. The mid-day bulletin had not mentioned any definite
area, but it was probable that already the mouth of the Congo was a
battlefield. Brazzaville and Leopoldville were in danger. One did not have
to look at the map to see what it meant. It was not merely a question of
losing Central Africa: for the first time in the whole war, the territory
of Oceania itself was menaced.
A violent emotion, not fear exactly but a sort of undifferentiated
excitement, flared up in him, then faded again. He stopped thinking about
the war. In these days he could never fix his mind on any one subject for
more than a few moments at a time. He picked up his glass and drained it
at a gulp. As always, the gin made him shudder and even retch slightly.
The stuff was horrible. The cloves and saccharine, themselves disgusting
enough in their sickly way, could not disguise the flat oily smell; and
what was worst of all was that the smell of gin, which dwelt with him
night and day, was inextricably mixed up in his mind with the smell of
those----
He never named them, even in his thoughts, and so far as it was possible
he never visualized them. They were something that he was half-aware of,
hovering close to his face, a smell that clung to his nostrils. As the gin
rose in him he belched through purple lips. He had grown fatter since they
released him, and had regained his old colour--indeed, more than regained
it. His features had thickened, the skin on nose and cheekbones was
coarsely red, even the bald scalp was too deep a pink. A waiter, again
unbidden, brought the chessboard and the current issue of 'The Times',
with the page turned down at the chess problem. Then, seeing that Winston's
glass was empty, he brought the gin bottle and filled it. There was no
need to give orders. They knew his habits. The chessboard was always
waiting for him, his corner table was always reserved; even when the place
was full he had it to himself, since nobody cared to be seen sitting too
close to him. He never even bothered to count his drinks. At irregular
intervals they presented him with a dirty slip of paper which they said
was the bill, but he had the impression that they always undercharged him.
It would have made no difference if it had been the other way about. He
had always plenty of money nowadays. He even had a job, a sinecure, more
highly-paid than his old job had been.
The music from the telescreen stopped and a voice took over. Winston raised
his head to listen. No bulletins from the front, however. It was merely a
brief announcement from the Ministry of Plenty. In the preceding quarter,
it appeared, the Tenth Three-Year Plan's quota for bootlaces had been
overfulfilled by 98 per cent.
He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky
ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two
moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always
mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without
exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of
the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying
triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm
power. White always mates.
The voice from the telescreen paused and added in a different and much
graver tone: 'You are warned to stand by for an important announcement at
fifteen-thirty. Fifteen-thirty! This is news of the highest importance.
Take care not to miss it. Fifteen-thirty!' The tinkling music struck up
again.
Winston's heart stirred. That was the bulletin from the front; instinct
told him that it was bad news that was coming. All day, with little spurts
of excitement, the thought of a smashing defeat in Africa had been in and
out of his mind. He seemed actually to see the Eurasian army swarming
across the never-broken frontier and pouring down into the tip of Africa
like a column of ants. Why had it not been possible to outflank them in
some way? The outline of the West African coast stood out vividly in his
mind. He picked up the white knight and moved it across the board. THERE
was the proper spot. Even while he saw the black horde racing southward he
saw another force, mysteriously assembled, suddenly planted in their rear,
cutting their communications by land and sea. He felt that by willing it he
was bringing that other force into existence. But it was necessary to act
quickly. If they could get control of the whole of Africa, if they had
airfields and submarine bases at the Cape, it would cut Oceania in two. It
might mean anything: defeat, breakdown, the redivision of the world, the
destruction of the Party! He drew a deep breath. An extraordinary medley
of feeling--but it was not a medley, exactly; rather it was successive
layers of feeling, in which one could not say which layer was
undermost--struggled inside him.
The spasm passed. He put the white knight back in its place, but for the
moment he could not settle down to serious study of the chess problem.
His thoughts wandered again. Almost unconsciously he traced with his
finger in the dust on the table:
2+2=5
'They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you.
'What happens to you here is FOR EVER,' O'Brien had said. That was a true
word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover.
Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
He had seen her; he had even spoken to her. There was no danger in it. He
knew as though instinctively that they now took almost no interest in his
doings. He could have arranged to meet her a second time if either of them
had wanted to. Actually it was by chance that they had met. It was in the
Park, on a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and
all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few
crocuses which had pushed themselves up to be dismembered by the wind. He
was hurrying along with frozen hands and watering eyes when he saw her not
ten metres away from him. It struck him at once that she had changed in
some ill-defined way. They almost passed one another without a sign, then
he turned and followed her, not very eagerly. He knew that there was no
danger, nobody would take any interest in him. She did not speak. She
walked obliquely away across the grass as though trying to get rid of him,
then seemed to resign herself to having him at her side. Presently they
were in among a clump of ragged leafless shrubs, useless either for
concealment or as protection from the wind. They halted. It was vilely
cold. The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional,
dirty-looking crocuses. He put his arm round her waist.
There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden microphones: besides,
they could be seen. It did not matter, nothing mattered. They could have
lain down on the ground and done THAT if they had wanted to. His flesh
froze with horror at the thought of it. She made no response whatever to
the clasp of his arm; she did not even try to disengage herself. He knew
now what had changed in her. Her face was sallower, and there was a long
scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple; but that
was not the change. It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a
surprising way, had stiffened. He remembered how once, after the explosion
of a rocket bomb, he had helped to drag a corpse out of some ruins, and
had been astonished not only by the incredible weight of the thing, but by
its rigidity and awkwardness to handle, which made it seem more like stone
than flesh. Her body felt like that. It occurred to him that the texture
of her skin would be quite different from what it had once been.
He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. As they walked back
across the grass, she looked directly at him for the first time. It
was only a momentary glance, full of contempt and dislike. He wondered
whether it was a dislike that came purely out of the past or whether it
was inspired also by his bloated face and the water that the wind kept
squeezing from his eyes. They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side
but not too close together. He saw that she was about to speak. She moved
her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig. Her
feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.
'I betrayed you,' she said baldly.
'I betrayed you,' he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
'Sometimes,' she said, 'they threaten you with something something you
can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it
to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so." And perhaps you might
pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to
make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time
when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving
yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to
happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All
you care about is yourself.'
'All you care about is yourself,' he echoed.
'And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other person any
longer.'
'No,' he said, 'you don't feel the same.'
There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind plastered their
thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing
to sit there in silence: besides, it was too cold to keep still. She said
something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.
'We must meet again,' he said.
'Yes,' she said, 'we must meet again.'
He followed irresolutely for a little distance, half a pace behind her.
They did not speak again. She did not actually try to shake him off, but
walked at just such a speed as to prevent his keeping abreast of her.
He had made up his mind that he would accompany her as far as the Tube
station, but suddenly this process of trailing along in the cold seemed
pointless and unbearable. He was overwhelmed by a desire not so much to
get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree Cafe, which had
never seemed so attractive as at this moment. He had a nostalgic vision
of his corner table, with the newspaper and the chessboard and the
ever-flowing gin. Above all, it would be warm in there. The next moment,
not altogether by accident, he allowed himself to become separated from
her by a small knot of people. He made a half-hearted attempt to catch up,
then slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite direction. When he
had gone fifty metres he looked back. The street was not crowded, but
already he could not distinguish her. Any one of a dozen hurrying figures
might have been hers. Perhaps her thickened, stiffened body was no longer
recognizable from behind.
'At the time when it happens,' she had said, 'you do mean it.' He had
meant it. He had not merely said it, he had wished it. He had wished that
she and not he should be delivered over to the----
Something changed in the music that trickled from the telescreen. A
cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came into it. And then--perhaps
it was not happening, perhaps it was only a memory taking on the semblance
of sound--a voice was singing:
'Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me----'
The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed that his glass
was empty and came back with the gin bottle.
He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but more
horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he
swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin that
sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every morning.
When he woke, seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids and
fiery mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been
impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the
bottle and teacup placed beside the bed overnight. Through the midday
hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the
telescreen. From fifteen to closing-time he was a fixture in the Chestnut
Tree. No one cared what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no
telescreen admonished him. Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went
to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of Truth and did
a little work, or what was called work. He had been appointed to a
sub-committee of a sub-committee which had sprouted from one of the
innumerable committees dealing with minor difficulties that arose in the
compilation of the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. They were
engaged in producing something called an Interim Report, but what it was
that they were reporting on he had never definitely found out. It was
something to do with the question of whether commas should be placed
inside brackets, or outside. There were four others on the committee, all
of them persons similar to himself. There were days when they assembled
and then promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to one another that
there was not really anything to be done. But there were other days when
they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show
of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never
finished--when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about
grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over
definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels--threats, even, to appeal to
higher authority. And then suddenly the life would go out of them and
they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes,
like ghosts fading at cock-crow.
The telescreen was silent for a moment. Winston raised his head again. The
bulletin! But no, they were merely changing the music. He had the map of
Africa behind his eyelids. The movement of the armies was a diagram: a
black arrow tearing vertically southward, and a white arrow horizontally
eastward, across the tail of the first. As though for reassurance he
looked up at the imperturbable face in the portrait. Was it conceivable
that the second arrow did not even exist?
His interest flagged again. He drank another mouthful of gin, picked up
the white knight and made a tentative move. Check. But it was evidently
not the right move, because----
Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind. He saw a candle-lit room with a
vast white-counterpaned bed, and himself, a boy of nine or ten, sitting on
the floor, shaking a dice-box, and laughing excitedly. His mother was
sitting opposite him and also laughing.
It must have been about a month before she disappeared. It was a moment of
reconciliation, when the nagging hunger in his belly was forgotten and his
earlier affection for her had temporarily revived. He remembered the day
well, a pelting, drenching day when the water streamed down the window-pane
and the light indoors was too dull to read by. The boredom of the two
children in the dark, cramped bedroom became unbearable. Winston whined
and grizzled, made futile demands for food, fretted about the room pulling
everything out of place and kicking the wainscoting until the neighbours
banged on the wall, while the younger child wailed intermittently. In the
end his mother said, 'Now be good, and I'll buy you a toy. A lovely
toy--you'll love it'; and then she had gone out in the rain, to a little
general shop which was still sporadically open nearby, and came back with
a cardboard box containing an outfit of Snakes and Ladders. He could still
remember the smell of the damp cardboard. It was a miserable outfit. The
board was cracked and the tiny wooden dice were so ill-cut that they
would hardly lie on their sides. Winston looked at the thing sulkily and
without interest. But then his mother lit a piece of candle and they sat
down on the floor to play. Soon he was wildly excited and shouting with
laughter as the tiddly-winks climbed hopefully up the ladders and then
came slithering down the snakes again, almost to the starting-point. They
played eight games, winning four each. His tiny sister, too young to
understand what the game was about, had sat propped up against a bolster,
laughing because the others were laughing. For a whole afternoon they had
all been happy together, as in his earlier childhood.
He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was
troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as
one knew them for what they were. Some things had happened, others had not
happened. He turned back to the chessboard and picked up the white knight
again. Almost in the same instant it dropped on to the board with a
clatter. He had started as though a pin had run into him.
A shrill trumpet-call had pierced the air. It was the bulletin! Victory!
It always meant victory when a trumpet-call preceded the news. A sort of
electric drill ran through the cafe. Even the waiters had started and
pricked up their ears.
The trumpet-call had let loose an enormous volume of noise. Already an
excited voice was gabbling from the telescreen, but even as it started
it was almost drowned by a roar of cheering from outside. The news had
run round the streets like magic. He could hear just enough of what was
issuing from the telescreen to realize that it had all happened, as he had
foreseen; a vast seaborne armada had secretly assembled a sudden blow in
the enemy's rear, the white arrow tearing across the tail of the black.
Fragments of triumphant phrases pushed themselves through the din: 'Vast
strategic manoeuvre--perfect co-ordination--utter rout--half a million
prisoners--complete demoralization--control of the whole of Africa--bring
the war within measurable distance of its end--victory--greatest victory
in human history--victory, victory, victory!'
Under the table Winston's feet made convulsive movements. He had not
stirred from his seat, but in his mind he was running, swiftly running,
he was with the crowds outside, cheering himself deaf. He looked up again
at the portrait of Big Brother. The colossus that bestrode the world!
The rock against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain! He
thought how ten minutes ago--yes, only ten minutes--there had still been
equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the news from the front
would be of victory or defeat. Ah, it was more than a Eurasian army that
had perished! Much had changed in him since that first day in the Ministry
of Love, but the final, indispensable, healing change had never happened,
until this moment.
The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners
and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little.
The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with
the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention
as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He
was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white
as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating
everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling
of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for
bullet was entering his brain.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn
what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless
misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!
Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all
right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won
the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
THE END
APPENDIX.
The Principles of Newspeak
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet
the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984
there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of
communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in
'The Times' were written in it, but this was a TOUR DE FORCE which could
only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would
have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should
call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all
Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions
more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and
embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was
a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic
formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final,
perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary,
that we are concerned here.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression
for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc,
but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that
when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten,
a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of
Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is
dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and
often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could
properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the
possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly
by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable
words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and
so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single
example. The word FREE still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be
used in such statements as 'This dog is free from lice' or 'This field is
free from weeds'. It could not be used in its old sense of 'politically
free' or 'intellectually free' since political and intellectual freedom no
longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.
Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction
of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be
dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend
but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly
assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though
many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly-created words,
would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak
words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary,
the B vocabulary (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary.
It will be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical
peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to
the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.
THE A VOCABULARY. The A vocabulary consisted of the words needed for the
business of everyday life--for such things as eating, drinking, working,
putting on one's clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles,
gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words
that we already possess words like HIT, RUN, DOG, TREE, SUGAR, HOUSE,
FIELD--but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary their
number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly
defined. All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of
them. So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was
simply a staccato sound expressing ONE clearly understood concept. It
would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary
purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended
only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete
objects or physical actions.
The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities. The first of
these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of
speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very
abstract words such as IF or WHEN) could be used either as verb, noun,
adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and the noun form, when they were
of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself
involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word THOUGHT, for
example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by THINK, which
did duty for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was followed
here: in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention,
in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and verb of kindred meaning
were not etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently
suppressed. There was, for example, no such word as CUT, its meaning being
sufficiently covered by the noun-verb KNIFE. Adjectives were formed by
adding the suffix -FUL to the noun-verb, and adverbs by adding -WISE. Thus
for example, SPEEDFUL meant 'rapid' and SPEEDWISE meant 'quickly'. Certain
of our present-day adjectives, such as GOOD, STRONG, BIG, BLACK, SOFT,
were retained, but their total number was very small. There was little
need for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived at by
adding -FUL to a noun-verb. None of the now-existing adverbs was retained,
except for a very few already ending in -WISE: the -WISE termination was
invariable. The word WELL, for example, was replaced by GOODWISE.
In addition, any word--this again applied in principle to every word in
the language--could be negatived by adding the affix UN-, or could be
strengthened by the affix PLUS-, or, for still greater emphasis,
DOUBLEPLUS-. Thus, for example, UNCOLD meant 'warm', while PLUSCOLD and
DOUBLEPLUSCOLD meant, respectively, 'very cold' and 'superlatively cold'.
It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of
almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ANTE-, POST-, UP-, DOWN-,
etc. By such methods it was found possible to bring about an enormous
diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word GOOD, there was no
need for such a word as BAD, since the required meaning was equally
well--indeed, better--expressed by UNGOOD. All that was necessary, in any
case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide
which of them to suppress. DARK, for example, could be replaced by UNLIGHT,
or LIGHT by UNDARK, according to preference.
The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity.
Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned below all inflexions
followed the same rules. Thus, in all verbs the preterite and the past
participle were the same and ended in -ED. The preterite of STEAL was
STEALED, the preterite of THINK was THINKED, and so on throughout the
language, all such forms as SWAM, GAVE, BROUGHT, SPOKE, TAKEN, etc., being
abolished. All plurals were made by adding -S or -ES as the case might be.
The plurals OF MAN, OX, LIFE, were MANS, OXES, LIFES. Comparison of
adjectives was invariably made by adding -ER, -EST (GOOD, GOODER, GOODEST),
irregular forms and the MORE, MOST formation being suppressed.
The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly
were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the
auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except that
WHOM had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the SHALL, SHOULD tenses had
been dropped, all their uses being covered by WILL and WOULD. There were
also certain irregularities in word-formation arising out of the need for
rapid and easy speech. A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable
to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word; occasionally
therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word
or an archaic formation was retained. But this need made itself felt
chiefly in connexion with the B vocabulary. WHY so great an importance was
attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in this essay.
THE B VOCABULARY. The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been
deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say,
which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended
to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Without
a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use
these words correctly. In some cases they could be translated into
Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually
demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain
overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing
whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more
accurate and forcible than ordinary language.
The B words were in all cases compound words. [Compound words such as
SPEAKWRITE, were of course to be found in the A vocabulary, but these were
merely convenient abbreviations and had no special ideological colour.]
They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together
in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a
noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take a single
example: the word GOODTHINK, meaning, very roughly, 'orthodoxy', or, if
one chose to regard it as a verb, 'to think in an orthodox manner'. This
inflected as follows: noun-verb, GOODTHINK; past tense and past participle,
GOODTHINKED; present participle, GOOD-THINKING; adjective, GOODTHINKFUL;
adverb, GOODTHINKWISE; verbal noun, GOODTHINKER.
The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of
which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed
in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce
while indicating their derivation. In the word CRIMETHINK (thoughtcrime),
for instance, the THINK came second, whereas in THINKPOL (Thought Police)
it came first, and in the latter word POLICE had lost its second syllable.
Because of the great difficulty in securing euphony, irregular formations
were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A vocabulary. For example,
the adjective forms of MINITRUE, MINIPAX, and MINILUV were, respectively,
MINITRUTHFUL, MINIPEACEFUL, and MINILOVELY, simply because -TRUEFUL,
-PAXFUL, and -LOVEFUL were slightly awkward to pronounce. In principle,
however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the
same way.
Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to
anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. Consider, for example,
such a typical sentence from a 'Times' leading article as OLDTHINKERS
UNBELLYFEEL INGSOC. The shortest rendering that one could make of this
in Oldspeak would be: 'Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution
cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English
Socialism.' But this is not an adequate translation. To begin with, in
order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above,
one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by INGSOC. And in
addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate
the full force of the word BELLYFEEL, which implied a blind, enthusiastic
acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word OLDTHINK, which was
inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. But the
special function of certain Newspeak words, of which OLDTHINK was one,
was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words,
necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they
contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were
sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped
and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak
Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make
sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words
they cancelled by their existence.
As we have already seen in the case of the word FREE, words which had
once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of
convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them.
Countless other words such as HONOUR, JUSTICE, MORALITY, INTERNATIONALISM,
DEMOCRACY, SCIENCE, and RELIGION had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket
words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words
grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for
instance, were contained in the single word CRIMETHINK, while all words
grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism
were contained in the single word OLDTHINK. Greater precision would have
been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar
to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that
all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. He did not need to
know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the
like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy.
He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that
all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat
the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in
exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from
it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by
the two Newspeak words SEXCRIME (sexual immorality) and GOODSEX (chastity).
SEXCRIME covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication,
adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal
intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate
them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle,
all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific
and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to
certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them.
He knew what was meant by GOODSEX--that is to say, normal intercourse
between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and
without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was SEXCRIME.
In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further
than the perception that it WAS heretical: beyond that point the necessary
words were nonexistent.
No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were
euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as JOYCAMP (forced-labour camp) or
MINIPAX (Ministry of Peace, i.e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact
opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand,
displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of
Oceanic society. An example was PROLEFEED, meaning the rubbishy
entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses.
Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation 'good' when
applied to the Party and 'bad' when applied to its enemies. But in
addition there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared
to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideological colour not
from their meaning, but from their structure.
So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have
political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The
name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or
institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar
shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number
of syllables that would preserve the original derivation. In the Ministry
of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith
worked, was called RECDEP, the Fiction Department was called FICDEP, the
Teleprogrammes Department was called TELEDEP, and so on. This was not
done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early decades of
the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the
characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed
that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in
totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such
words as NAZI, GESTAPO, COMINTERN, INPRECORR, AGITPROP. In the beginning
the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak
it was used with a conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus
abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by
cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.
The words COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL, for instance, call up a composite
picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx,
and the Paris Commune. The word COMINTERN, on the other hand, suggests
merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine.
It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in
purpose, as a chair or a table. COMINTERN is a word that can be uttered
almost without taking thought, whereas COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL is a phrase
over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way,
the associations called up by a word like MINITRUE are fewer and more
controllable than those called up by MINISTRY OF TRUTH. This accounted not
only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the
almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily
pronounceable.
In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude
of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it
seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for
political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which
could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the
speaker's mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from
the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably
these words--GOODTHINK, MINIPAX, PROLEFEED, SEXCRIME, JOYCAMP, INGSOC,
BELLYFEEL, THINKPOL, and countless others--were words of two or three
syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable
and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at
once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The
intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not
ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes
necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to
make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the
correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets.
His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost
foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound
and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of
Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.
So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our
own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were
constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other
languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every
year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice,
the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to
make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher
brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word
DUCKSPEAK, meaning 'to quack like a duck'. Like various other words in
the B vocabulary, DUCKSPEAK was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the
opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but
praise, and when 'The Times' referred to one of the orators of the Party
as a DOUBLEPLUSGOOD DUCKSPEAKER it was paying a warm and valued compliment.
THE C VOCABULARY. The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and
consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These resembled the
scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same roots,
but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of
undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules as the
words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any
currency either in everyday speech or in political speech. Any scientific
worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted
to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the
words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were common to
all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science
as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular
branches. There was, indeed, no word for 'Science', any meaning that it
could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word INGSOC.
From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression
of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible.
It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a
species of blasphemy. It would have been possible, for example, to say
BIG BROTHER IS UNGOOD. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely
conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by
reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available. Ideas
inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form,
and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and
condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so.
One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by
illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. For
example, ALL MANS ARE EQUAL was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only
in the same sense in which ALL MEN ARE REDHAIRED is a possible Oldspeak
sentence. It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed
a palpable untruth--i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or
strength. The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this
secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word EQUAL.
In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication,
the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might
remember their original meanings. In practice it was not difficult for
any person well grounded in DOUBLETHINK to avoid doing this, but within
a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have
vanished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no
more know that EQUAL had once had the secondary meaning of 'politically
equal', or that FREE had once meant 'intellectually free', than for
instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the
secondary meanings attaching to QUEEN and ROOK. There would be many
crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply
because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be
foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics
of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced--its words growing
fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of
putting them to improper uses always diminishing.
When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with
the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten,
but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there,
imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of
Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even
if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable.
It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless
it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday
action, or was already orthodox (GOODTHINKFUL would be the Newspeak
expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before
approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary
literature could only be subjected to ideological translation--that is,
alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known
passage from the Declaration of Independence:
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL,
THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS,
THAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
THAT TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN,
DERIVING THEIR POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED. THAT WHENEVER
ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT BECOMES DESTRUCTIVE OF THOSE ENDS, IT IS THE RIGHT
OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT, AND TO INSTITUTE NEW GOVERNMENT...
It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while
keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing
so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word CRIMETHINK.
A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby
Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.
A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being
transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to
preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time
bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc.
Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and
some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had
been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of
the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were
a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would
be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first
century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian
literature--indispensable technical manuals, and the like--that had to
be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for
the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak
had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.
THE END
Definitely not Foundation
THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY
ISAAC ASIMOV
Contents
Introduction
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
About the author
THE STORY BEHIND THE "FOUNDATION"
By ISAAC ASIMOV
The date was August 1, 1941. World War II had been raging for two years. France had fallen, the Battle
of Britain had been fought, and the Soviet Union had just been invaded by Nazi Germany. The bombing
of Pearl Harbor was four months in the future.
But on that day, with Europe in flames, and the evil shadow of Adolf Hitler apparently falling over all
the world, what was chiefly on my mind was a meeting toward which I was hastening.
I was 2 1 years old, a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia University, and I had been writing
science fiction professionally for three years. In that time, I had sold five stories to John Campbell, editor
of Astounding, and the fifth story, "Nightfall," was about to appear in the September 1941 issue of the
magazine. I had an appointment to see Mr. Campbell to tell him the plot of a new story I was planning to
write, and the catch was that I had no plot in mind, not the trace of one.
I therefore tried a device I sometimes use. I opened a book at random and set up free association,
beginning with whatever I first saw. The book I had with me was a collection of the Gilbert and Sullivan
plays. I happened to open it to the picture of the Fairy Queen of lolanthe throwing herself at the feet of
Private Willis. I thought of soldiers, of military empires, of the Roman Empire - of a Galactic Empire -
aha!
Why shouldn't I write of the fall of the Galactic Empire and of the return of feudalism, written from the
viewpoint of someone in the secure days of the Second Galactic Empire? After all, I had read Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire not once, but twice.
I was bubbling over by the time I got to Campbell's, and my enthusiasm must have been catching for
Campbell blazed up as I had never seen him do. In the course of an hour we built up the notion of a vast
series of connected stories that were to deal in intricate detail with the thousand-year period between the
First and Second Galactic Empires. This was to be illuminated by the science of psychohistory, which
Campbell and I thrashed out between us.
On August 11, 1941, therefore, I began the story of that interregnum and called it "Foundation." In it, I
described how the psychohistorian, Hari Seldon, established a pair of Foundations at opposite ends of the
Universe under such circumstances as to make sure that the forces of history would bring about the
second Empire after one thousand years instead of the thirty thousand that would be required otherwise.
The story was submitted on September 8 and, to make sure that Campbell really meant what he said
about a series, I ended "Foundation" on a cliff-hanger. Thus, it seemed to me, he would b e forced to buy
a second story.
However, when I started the second story (on October 24), I found that I had outsmarted myself. I
quickly wrote myself into an impasse, and the Foundation series would have died an ignominious death
had I not had a conversation with Fred Pohl on November 2 (on the Brooklyn Bridge, as it happened). I
don't remember what Fred actually said, but, whatever it was, it pulled me out of the hole.
"Foundation" appeared in the May 1942 issue of As founding and the succeeding story, "Bridle and
Saddle," in the June 1942 issue.
After that there was only the routine trouble of writing the stories. Through the remainder of the decade,
John Campbell kept my nose to the grindstone and made sure he got additional Foundation stories.
"The Big and the Little" was in the August 1944 Astounding, "The Wedge" in the October 1944 issue,
and "Dead Hand" in the April 1945 issue. (These stories were written while I was working at the Navy
Yard in Philadelphia.)
On January 26, 1945, 1 began "The Mule," my personal favorite among the Foundation stories, and the
longest yet, for it was 50,000 words. It was printed as a two-part serial (the very first serial I was ever
responsible for) in the November and December 1945 issues. By the time the second part appeared I was
in the army.
After I got out of the army, I wrote "Now You See It-" which appeared in the January 1948 issue. By this
time, though, I had grown tired of the Foundation stories so I tried to end them by setting up, and solving,
the mystery of the location of the Second Foundation. Campbell would have none of that, however. He
forced me to change the ending, and made me promise I would do one more Foundation story.
Well, Campbell was the kind of editor who could not be denied, so I wrote one more Foundation story,
vowing to myself that it would be the last. I called it "-And Now You Don't," and it appeared as a
three-part serial in the November 1949, December 1949, and January 1950 issues of Astounding.
By then, I was on the biochemistry faculty of Boston University School of Medicine, my first book had
just been published, and I was determined to move on to new things. I had spent eight years on the
Foundation, written nine stories with a total of about 220,000 words. My total earnings for the series
came to $3,641 and that seemed enough. The Foundation was over and done with, as far as I was
concerned.
In 1950, however, hardcover science fiction was just coming into existence. I had no objection to earning
a little more money by having the Foundation series reprinted in book form. I offered the series to
Doubleday (which had already published a science-fiction novel by me, and which had contracted for
another) and to Little-Brown, but both rejected it. In that year, though, a small publishing firm, Gnome
Press, was beginning to be active, and it was prepared to do the Foundation series as three books.
The publisher of Gnome felt, however, that the series began too abruptly. He persuaded me to write a
small Foundation story, one that would serve as an introductory section to the first book (so that the first
part of the Foundation series was the last written).
In 1951, the Gnome Press edition of Foundation was published, containing the introduction and the first
four stories of the series. In 1952, Foundation and Empire appeared, with the fifth and sixth stories; and
in 1953, Second Foundation appeared, with the seventh and eighth stories. The three books together
came to be called The Foundation Trilogy.
The mere fact of the existence of the Trilogy pleased me, but Gnome Press did not have the financial
clout or the publishing knowhow to get the books distributed properly, so that few copies were sold and
fewer still paid me royalties. (Nowadays, copies of first editions of those Gnome Press books sell at $50
a copy and up-but I still get no royalties from them.)
Ace Books did put out paperback editions of Foundation and of Foundation and Empire, but they
changed the titles, and used cut versions. Any money that was involved was paid to Gnome Press and I
didn't see much of that. In the first decade of the existence of The Foundation Trilogy it may have earned
something like $1500 total.
And yet there was some foreign interest. In early 1961, Timothy Seldes, who was then my editor at
Doubleday, told me that Doubleday had received a request for the Portuguese rights for the Foundation
series and, since they weren't Doubleday books, he was passing them on to me. I sighed and said, "The
heck with it, Tim. I don't get royalties on those books."
Seldes was horrified, and instantly set about getting the books away from Gnome Press so that
Doubleday could publish them instead. He paid no attention to my loudly expressed fears that Doubleday
"would lose its shirt on them." In August 1961 an agreement was reached and the Foundation books
became Doubleday property. What’s more, Avon Books, which had published a paperback version of
Second Foundation, set about obtaining the rights to all three from Doubleday, and put out nice editions.
From that moment on, the Foundation books took off and began to earn increasing royalties. They have
sold well and steadily, both in hardcover and softcover, for two decades so far. Increasingly, the letters I
received from the readers spoke of them in high praise. They received more attention than all my other
books put together.
Doubleday also published an omnibus volume, The Foundation Trilogy, for its Science Fiction Book
Club. That omnibus volume has been continuously featured by the Book Club for over twenty years.
Matters reached a climax in 1966. The fans organizing the World Science Fiction Convention for that
year (to be held in Cleveland) decided to award a Hugo for the best all-time series, where the series, to
qualify, had to consist of at least three connected novels. It was the first time such a category had been
set up, nor has it been repeated since. The Foundation series was nominated, and I felt that was going to
have to be glory enough for me, since I was sure that Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" would win.
It didn't. The Foundation series won, and the Hugo I received for it has been sitting on my bookcase in
the livingroom ever since.
In among all this litany of success, both in money and in fame, there was one annoying side-effect.
Readers couldn't help but notice that the books of the Foundation series covered only three hundred-plus
years of the thousand-year hiatus between Empires. That meant the Foundation series "wasn't finished." I
got innumerable letters from readers who asked me to finish it, from others who demanded I finish it, and
still others who threatened dire vengeance if I didn't finish it. Worse yet, various editors at Doubleday
over the years have pointed out that it might be wise to finish it.
It was flattering, of course, but irritating as well. Years had passed, then decades. Back in the 1940s, I
had been in a Foundation- writing mood. Now I wasn't. Starting in the late 1950s, I had been in a more
and more nonfiction-writing mood.
That didn't mean I was writing no fiction at all. In the 1960s and 1970s, in fact, I wrote two
science-fiction novels and a mystery novel, to say nothing of well over a hundred short stories - but
about eighty percent of what I wrote was nonfiction.
One of the most indefatigable nags in the matter of finishing the Foundation series was my good friend,
the great science-fiction writer, Lester del Rey. He was constantly telling me I ought to finish the series
and was just as constantly suggesting plot devices. He even told Larry Ashmead, then my editor at
Doubleday, that if I refused to write more Foundation stories, he, Lester, would be willing to take on the
task.
When Ashmead mentioned this to me in 1973, 1 began another Foundation novel out of sheer
desperation. I called it "Lightning Rod" and managed to write fourteen pages before other tasks called me
away. The fourteen pages were put away and additional years passed.
In January 1977, Cathleen Jordan, then my editor at Doubleday, suggested I do "an important book - a
Foundation novel, perhaps." I said, "I'd rather do an autobiography," and I did - 640,000 words of it.
In January 1981, Doubleday apparently lost its temper. At least, Hugh O'Neill, then my editor there, said,
"Betty Prashker wants to see you," and marched me into her office. She was then one of the senior
editors, and a sweet and gentle person.
She wasted no time. "Isaac," she said, "you are going to write a novel for us and you are going to sign a
contract to that effect."
"Betty," I said, "I am already working on a big science book for Doubleday and I have to revise the
Biographical Encyclopedia for Doubleday and
"It can all wait," she said. "You are going to sign a contract to do a novel. What's more, we're going to
give you a $50,000 advance."
That was a stunner. I don't like large advances. They put me under too great an obligation. My average
advance is something like $3,000. Why not? It's all out of royalties.
I said, "That's way too much money, Betty."
"No, it isn't," she said.
"Doubleday will lose its shirt," I said.
"You keep telling us that all the time. It won't."
I said, desperately, "All right. Have the contract read that I don't get any money until I notify you in
writing that I have begun the novel."
"Are you crazy?" she said. "You'll never start if that clause is in the contract. You get $25,000 on signing
the contract, and $25,000 on delivering a completed manuscript."
"But suppose the novel is no good."
"Now you're being silly," she said, and she ended the conversation.
That night, Pat LoBrutto, the science-fiction editor at Doubleday called to express his pleasure. "And
remember," he said, "that when we say 'novel' we mean ’science-fiction novel,’ not anything else. And
when we say ’science-fiction novel,’ we mean 'Foundation novel' and not anything else."
On February 5, 1981, 1 signed the contract, and within the week, the Doubleday accounting system
cranked out the check for $25,000.
I moaned that I was not my own master anymore and Hugh O'Neill said, cheerfully, "That’s right, and
from now on, we're going to call every other week and say, ’Where’s the manuscript?’" (But they didn't.
They left me strictly alone, and never even asked for a progress report.)
Nearly four months passed while I took care of a vast number of things I had to do, but about the end of
May, I picked up my own copy of The Foundation Trilogy and began reading.
I had to. For one thing, I hadn't read the Trilogy in thirty years and while I remembered the general plot, I
did not remember the details. Besides, before beginning a new Foundation novel I had to immerse myself
in the style and atmosphere of the series.
I read it with mounting uneasiness. I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All
three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and of conversations. No
action. No physical suspense.
What was all the fuss about, then? Why did everyone want more of that stuff? - To be sure, I couldn't
help but notice that I was turning the pages eagerly, and that I was upset when I finished the book, and
that I wanted more, but I was the author, for goodness' sake. You couldn't go by me.
I was on the edge of deciding it was all a terrible mistake and of insisting on giving back the money,
when (quite by accident, I swear) I came across some sentences by science-fiction writer and critic,
James Gunn, who, in connection with the Foundation series, said, "Action and romance have little to do
with the success of the Trilogy - virtually all the action takes place offstage, and the romance is almost
invisible - but the stories provide a detective- story fascination with the permutations and reversals of
ideas."
Oh, well, if what was needed were "permutations and reversals of ideas," then that I could supply. Panic
receded, and on June 10, 1981, 1 dug out the fourteen pages I had written more than eight years before
and reread them. They sounded good to me. I didn't remember where I had been headed back then, but I
had worked out what seemed to me to be a good ending now, and, starting page 15 on that day, I
proceeded to work toward the new ending.
I found, to my infinite relief, that I had no trouble getting back into a "Foundation-mood," and, fresh
from my rereading, I had Foundation history at my finger-tips.
There were differences, to be sure:
1) The original stories were written for a science-fiction magazine and were from 7,000 to 50,000 words
long, and no more. Consequently, each book in the trilogy had at least two stories and lacked unity. I
intended to make the new book a single story.
2) I had a particularly good chance for development since Hugh said, "Let the book find its own length,
Isaac. We don't mind a long book." So I planned on 140,000 words, which was nearly three times the
length of "The Mule," and this gave me plenty of elbow-room, and I could add all sorts of little touches.
3) The Foundation series had been written at a time when our knowledge of astronomy was primitive
compared with what it is today. I could take advantage of that and at least mention black holes, for
instance. I could also take advantage of electronic computers, which had not been invented until I was
half through with the series.
The novel progressed steadily, and on January 17, 1982, 1 began final copy. I brought the manuscript to
Hugh O'Neill in batches, and the poor fellow went half-crazy since he insisted on reading it in this
broken fashion. On March 25, 1982, 1 brought in the last bit, and the very next day got the second half of
the advance.
I had kept "Lightning Rod" as my working title all the way through, but Hugh finally said, "Is there any
way of putting 'Foundation' into the title, Isaac?" I suggested Foundations at Bay, therefore, and that may
be the title that will actually be used. *
You will have noticed that I have said nothing about the plot of the new Foundation novel. Well,
naturally. I would rather you buy and read the book.
And yet there is one thing I have to confess to you. I generally manage to tie up all the loose ends into
one neat little bow-knot at the end of my stories, no matter how complicated the plot might be. In this
case, however, I noticed that when I was all done, one glaring little item remained unresolved.
I am hoping no one else notices it because it clearly points the way to the continuation of the series.
It is even possible that I inadvertently gave this away for at the end of the novel, I wrote: "The End (for
now)."
I very much fear that if the novel proves successful, Doubleday will be at my throat again, as Campbell
used to be in the old days. And yet what can I do but hope that the novel is very successful indeed. What
a quandary !
*Editor's note: The novel was published in October 1982 as Foundation's Edge.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Isaac Asimov was born in the Soviet Union to his great surprise. He moved quickly to correct the
situation. When his parents emigrated to the United States, Isaac (three years old at the time) stowed
away in their baggage. He has been an American citizen since the age of eight.
Brought up in Brooklyn, and educated in its public schools, he eventually found his way to Columbia
University and, over the protests of the school administration, managed to annex a series of degrees in
chemistry, up to and including a Ph.D. He then infiltrated Boston University and climbed the academic
ladder, ignoring all cries of outrage, until he found himself Professor of Biochemistry.
Meanwhile, at the age of nine, he found the love of his life (in the inanimate sense) when he discovered
his first science-fiction magazine. By the time he was eleven, he began to write stories, and at eighteen,
he actually worked up the nerve to submit one. It was rejected. After four long months of tribulation and
suffering, he sold his first story and, thereafter, he never looked back.
In 1941, when he was twenty-one years old, he wrote the classic short story "Nightfall" and his future
was assured. Shortly before that he had begun writing his robot stories, and shortly after that he had
begun his Foundation series.
What was left except quantity? At the present time, he has published over 260 books, distributed through
every major division of the Dewey system of library classification, and shows no signs of slowing up. He
remains as youthful, as lively, and as lovable as ever, and grows more handsome with each year. You can
be sure that this is so since he has written this little essay himself and his devotion to absolute objectivity
is notorious.
He is married to Janet Jeppson, psychiatrist and writer, has two children by a previous marriage, and
lives in New York City.
ejusir jyj ecows
ASIMOV
THE FOUNDATION NOVELS
FOUNDATION
FOUNDATION
ISAAC ASIMOV
Contents
Introduction
Part I The Psvchohistorians
Part II The Encyclopedists
Part III The Mayors
Part IV The Traders
Part V The Merchant Princes
THE STORY BEHIND THE "FOUNDATION"
By ISAAC ASIMOV
The date was August 1 , 1941 . World War II had been raging for two years. France had fallen,
the Battle of Britain had been fought, and the Soviet Union had just been invaded by Nazi
Germany. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was four months in the future.
But on that day, with Europe in flames, and the evil shadow of Adolf Hitler apparently falling
over all the world, what was chiefly on my mind was a meeting toward which I was hastening.
I was 21 years old, a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia University, and I had been
writing science fiction professionally for three years. In that time, I had sold five stories to John
Campbell, editor of Astounding, and the fifth story, "Nightfall," was about to appear in the
September 1941 issue of the magazine. I had an appointment to see Mr. Campbell to tell him
the plot of a new story I was planning to write, and the catch was that I had no plot in mind, not
the trace of one.
I therefore tried a device I sometimes use. I opened a book at random and set up free
association, beginning with whatever I first saw. The book I had with me was a collection of the
Gilbert and Sullivan plays. I happened to open it to the picture of the Fairy Queen of lolanthe
throwing herself at the feet of Private Willis. I thought of soldiers, of military empires, of the
Roman Empire - of a Galactic Empire - aha!
Why shouldn't I write of the fall of the Galactic Empire and of the return of feudalism, written
from the viewpoint of someone in the secure days of the Second Galactic Empire? After all, I
had read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire not once, but twice.
I was bubbling over by the time I got to Campbell's, and my enthusiasm must have been
catching for Campbell blazed up as I had never seen him do. In the course of an hour we built
up the notion of a vast series of connected stories that were to deal in intricate detail with the
thousand-year period between the First and Second Galactic Empires. This was to be
illuminated by the science of psychohistory, which Campbell and I thrashed out between us.
On August 11,1 941 , therefore, I began the story of that interregnum and called it "Foundation."
In it, I described how the psychohistorian, Hari Seldon, established a pair of Foundations at
opposite ends of the Universe under such circumstances as to make sure that the forces of
history would bring about the second Empire after one thousand years instead of the thirty
thousand that would be required otherwise.
The story was submitted on September 8 and, to make sure that Campbell really meant what
he said about a series, I ended "Foundation" on a cliff-hanger. Thus, it seemed to me, he would
be forced to buy a second story.
Flowever, when I started the second story (on October 24), I found that I had outsmarted
myself. I quickly wrote myself into an impasse, and the Foundation series would have died an
ignominious death had I not had a conversation with Fred Pohl on November 2 (on the
Brooklyn Bridge, as it happened). I don't remember what Fred actually said, but, whatever it
was, it pulled me out of the hole.
"Foundation" appeared in the May 1942 issue of Astounding and the succeeding story, "Bridle
and Saddle," in the June 1942 issue.
After that there was only the routine trouble of writing the stories. Through the remainder of the
decade, John Campbell kept my nose to the grindstone and made sure he got additional
Foundation stories.
"The Big and the Little" was in the August 1944 Astounding, "The Wedge" in the October 1944
issue, and "Dead Fland" in the April 1945 issue. (These stories were written while I was working
at the Navy Yard in Philadelphia.)
On January 26, 1945, I began "The Mule," my personal favorite among the Foundation stories,
and the longest yet, for it was 50,000 words. It was printed as a two-part serial (the very first
serial I was ever responsible for) in the November and December 1945 issues. By the time the
second part appeared I was in the army.
After I got out of the army, I wrote "Now You See It-" which appeared in the January 1948
issue. By this time, though, I had grown tired of the Foundation stories so I tried to end them by
setting up, and solving, the mystery of the location of the Second Foundation. Campbell would
have none of that, however. Fie forced me to change the ending, and made me promise I would
do one more Foundation story.
Well, Campbell was the kind of editor who could not be denied, so I wrote one more Foundation
story, vowing to myself that it would be the last. I called it "-And Now You Don't," and it
appeared as a three-part serial in the November 1949, December 1949, and January 1950
issues of Astounding.
By then, I was on the biochemistry faculty of Boston University School of Medicine, my first
book had just been published, and I was determined to move on to new things. I had spent
eight years on the Foundation, written nine stories with a total of about 220,000 words. My total
earnings for the series came to $3,641 and that seemed enough. The Foundation was over and
done with, as far as I was concerned.
In 1950, however, hardcover science fiction was just coming into existence. I had no objection
to earning a little more money by having the Foundation series reprinted in book form. I offered
the series to Doubleday (which had already published a science-fiction novel by me, and which
had contracted for another) and to Little-Brown, but both rejected it. In that year, though, a
small publishing firm, Gnome Press, was beginning to be active, and it was prepared to do the
Foundation series as three books.
The publisher of Gnome felt, however, that the series began too abruptly. Fie persuaded me to
write a small Foundation story, one that would serve as an introductory section to the first book
(so that the first part of the Foundation series was the last written).
In 1951 , the Gnome Press edition of Foundation was published, containing the introduction and
the first four stories of the series. In 1 952, Foundation and Empire appeared, with the fifth and
sixth stories; and in 1953, Second Foundation appeared, with the seventh and eighth stories.
The three books together came to be called The Foundation Trilogy.
The mere fact of the existence of the Trilogy pleased me, but Gnome Press did not have the
financial clout or the publishing knowhow to get the books distributed properly, so that few
copies were sold and fewer still paid me royalties. (Nowadays, copies of first editions of those
Gnome Press books sell at $50 a copy and up-but I still get no royalties from them.)
Ace Books did put out paperback editions of Foundation and of Foundation and Empire, but
they changed the titles, and used cut versions. Any money that was involved was paid to
Gnome Press and I didn't see much of that. In the first decade of the existence of The
Foundation Trilogy it may have earned something like $1500 total.
And yet there was some foreign interest. In early 1961 , Timothy Seldes, who was then my
editor at Doubleday, told me that Doubleday had received a request for the Portuguese rights
for the Foundation series and, since they weren't Doubleday books, he was passing them on to
me. I sighed and said, "The heck with it, Tim. I don't get royalties on those books."
Seldes was horrified, and instantly set about getting the books away from Gnome Press so that
Doubleday could publish them instead. Fie paid no attention to my loudly expressed fears that
Doubleday "would lose its shirt on them." In August 1961 an agreement was reached and the
Foundation books became Doubleday property. What's more, Avon Books, which had
published a paperback version of Second Foundation, set about obtaining the rights to all three
from Doubleday, and put out nice editions.
From that moment on, the Foundation books took off and began to earn increasing royalties.
They have sold well and steadily, both in hardcover and softcover, for two decades so far.
Increasingly, the letters I received from the readers spoke of them in high praise. They received
more attention than all my other books put together.
Doubleday also published an omnibus volume, The Foundation Trilogy, for its Science Fiction
Book Club. That omnibus volume has been continuously featured by the Book Club for over
twenty years.
Matters reached a climax in 1966. The fans organizing the World Science Fiction Convention
for that year (to be held in Cleveland) decided to award a Flugo for the best all-time series,
where the series, to qualify, had to consist of at least three connected novels. It was the first
time such a category had been set up, nor has it been repeated since. The Foundation series
was nominated, and I felt that was going to have to be glory enough for me, since I was sure
that Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" would win.
It didn't. The Foundation series won, and the Hugo I received for it has been sitting on my
bookcase in the livingroom ever since.
In among all this litany of success, both in money and in fame, there was one annoying
side-effect. Readers couldn't help but notice that the books of the Foundation series covered
only three hundred-plus years of the thousand-year hiatus between Empires. That meant the
Foundation series "wasn't finished." I got innumerable letters from readers who asked me to
finish it, from others who demanded I finish it, and still others who threatened dire vengeance if
I didn't finish it. Worse yet, various editors at Doubleday over the years have pointed out that it
might be wise to finish it.
It was flattering, of course, but irritating as well. Years had passed, then decades. Back in the
1940s, I had been in a Foundation-writing mood. Now I wasn't. Starting in the late 1950s, I had
been in a more and more nonfiction-writing mood.
That didn't mean I was writing no fiction at all. In the 1960s and 1970s, in fact, I wrote two
science-fiction novels and a mystery novel, to say nothing of well over a hundred short stories -
but about eighty percent of what I wrote was nonfiction.
One of the most indefatigable nags in the matter of finishing the Foundation series was my
good friend, the great science-fiction writer, Lester del Rey. He was constantly telling me I
ought to finish the series and was just as constantly suggesting plot devices. He even told Larry
Ashmead, then my editor at Doubleday, that if I refused to write more Foundation stories, he,
Lester, would be willing to take on the task.
When Ashmead mentioned this to me in 1973, I began another Foundation novel out of sheer
desperation. I called it "Lightning Rod" and managed to write fourteen pages before other tasks
called me away. The fourteen pages were put away and additional years passed.
In January 1977, Cathleen Jordan, then my editor at Doubleday, suggested I do "an important
book - a Foundation novel, perhaps." I said, "I'd rather do an autobiography," and I did-
640,000 words of it.
In January 1981, Doubleday apparently lost its temper. At least, Hugh O'Neill, then my editor
there, said, "Betty Prashker wants to see you," and marched me into her office. She was then
one of the senior editors, and a sweet and gentle person.
She wasted no time. "Isaac," she said, "you are going to write a novel for us and you are going
to sign a contract to that effect."
"Betty," I said, "I am already working on a big science book for Doubleday and I have to revise
the Biographical Encyclopedia for Doubleday and
"It can all wait," she said. "You are going to sign a contract to do a novel. What's more, we're
going to give you a $50,000 advance."
That was a stunner. I don't like large advances. They put me under too great an obligation. My
average advance is something like $3,000. Why not? It's all out of royalties.
I said, "That's way too much money, Betty."
"No, it isn't," she said.
"Doubleday will lose its shirt," I said.
"You keep telling us that all the time. It won't."
I said, desperately, "All right. Have the contract read that I don't get any money until I notify you
in writing that I have begun the novel."
"Are you crazy?" she said. "You'll never start if that clause is in the contract. You get $25,000
on signing the contract, and $25,000 on delivering a completed manuscript."
"But suppose the novel is no good."
"Now you're being silly," she said, and she ended the conversation.
That night, Pat LoBrutto, the science-fiction editor at Doubleday called to express his pleasure.
"And remember," he said, "that when we say 'novel' we mean 'science-fiction novel,' not
anything else. And when we say 'science-fiction novel,' we mean 'Foundation novel' and not
anything else."
On February 5, 1981 , I signed the contract, and within the week, the Doubleday accounting
system cranked out the check for $25,000.
I moaned that I was not my own master anymore and Hugh O'Neill said, cheerfully, "That's
right, and from now on, we're going to call every other week and say, 'Where's the
manuscript?’" (But they didn't. They left me strictly alone, and never even asked for a progress
report.)
Nearly four months passed while I took care of a vast number of things I had to do, but about
the end of May, I picked up my own copy of The Foundation Trilogy and began reading.
I had to. For one thing, I hadn't read the Trilogy in thirty years and while I remembered the
general plot, I did not remember the details. Besides, before beginning a new Foundation novel
I had to immerse myself in the style and atmosphere of the series.
I read it with mounting uneasiness. I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever
did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and of
conversations. No action. No physical suspense.
What was all the fuss about, then? Why did everyone want more of that stuff? - To be sure, I
couldn't help but notice that I was turning the pages eagerly, and that I was upset when I
finished the book, and that I wanted more, but I was the author, for goodness' sake. You
couldn't go by me.
I was on the edge of deciding it was all a terrible mistake and of insisting on giving back the
money, when (quite by accident, I swear) I came across some sentences by science-fiction
writer and critic, James Gunn, who, in connection with the Foundation series, said, "Action and
romance have little to do with the success of the Trilogy- virtually all the action takes place
offstage, and the romance is almost invisible - but the stories provide a detective-story
fascination with the permutations and reversals of ideas."
Oh, well, if what was needed were "permutations and reversals of ideas," then that I could
supply. Panic receded, and on June 10, 1981, I dug out the fourteen pages I had written more
than eight years before and reread them. They sounded good to me. I didn't remember where I
had been headed back then, but I had worked out what seemed to me to be a good ending
now, and, starting page 15 on that day, I proceeded to work toward the new ending.
I found, to my infinite relief, that I had no trouble getting back into a "Foundation-mood," and,
fresh from my rereading, I had Foundation history at my finger-tips.
There were differences, to be sure:
1 ) The original stories were written for a science-fiction magazine and were from 7,000 to
50,000 words long, and no more. Consequently, each book in the trilogy had at least two
stories and lacked unity. I intended to make the new book a single story.
2) I had a particularly good chance for development since Flugh said, "Let the book find its own
length, Isaac. We don't mind a long book." So I planned on 140,000 words, which was nearly
three times the length of "The Mule," and this gave me plenty of elbow-room, and I could add
all sorts of little touches.
3) The Foundation series had been written at a time when our knowledge of astronomy was
primitive compared with what it is today. I could take advantage of that and at least mention
black holes, for instance. I could also take advantage of electronic computers, which had not
been invented until I was half through with the series.
The novel progressed steadily, and on January 17, 1982, I began final copy. I brought the
manuscript to Hugh O'Neill in batches, and the poor fellow went half-crazy since he insisted on
reading it in this broken fashion. On March 25, 1982, I brought in the last bit, and the very next
day got the second half of the advance.
I had kept "Lightning Rod" as my working title all the way through, but Hugh finally said, "Is
there any way of putting 'Foundation' into the title, Isaac?" I suggested Foundations at Bay,
therefore, and that may be the title that will actually be used. *
You will have noticed that I have said nothing about the plot of the new Foundation novel. Well,
naturally. I would rather you buy and read the book.
And yet there is one thing I have to confess to you. I generally manage to tie up all the loose
ends into one neat little bow-knot at the end of my stories, no matter how complicated the plot
might be. In this case, however, I noticed that when I was all done, one glaring little item
remained unresolved.
I am hoping no one else notices it because it clearly points the way to the continuation of the
series.
It is even possible that I inadvertently gave this away for at the end of the novel, I wrote: "The
End (for now)."
I very much fear that if the novel proves successful, Doubleday will be at my throat again, as
Campbell used to be in the old days. And yet what can I do but hope that the novel is very
successful indeed. What a quandary!
*Editor's note: The novel was published in October 1982 as Foundation's Edge.
PART I
THE PSYCHOHISTORIANS
i.
HARI SELDON-... bom In the 1 1,988th year of the Galactic Era; died 12,069. The dates are
more commonly given In terms of the current Foundational Era as - 79 to the year 1 F.E. Born
to middle-class parents on Flelicon, Arcturus sector (where his father, In a legend of doubtful
authenticity, was a tobacco grower in the hydroponic plants of the planet), he early showed
amazing ability in mathematics. Anecdotes concerning his ability are innumerable, and some
are contradictory. At the age of two, he is said to have ...
... Undoubtedly his greatest contributions were in the field of psychohistory. Seldon found the
field little more than a set of vague axioms; he left it a profound statistical science....
... The best existing authority we have for the details of his life is the biography written by Gaal
Dornick who. as a young man, met Seldon two years before the great mathematician's death.
The story of the meeting ...
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA*
* All quotations from the Encyclopedia Galactica here reproduced are taken from the 1 1 6th
Edition published in 1020 F.E. by the Encyclopedia Galactica Publishing Co., Terminus, with
permission of the publishers.
His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.
That is, not in real life. He had seen it many times on the hyper-video, and occasionally in
tremendous three-dimensional newscasts covering an Imperial Coronation or the opening of a
Galactic Council. Even though he had lived all his life on the world of Synnax, which circled a
star at the edges of the Blue Drift, he was not cut off from civilization, you see. At that time, no
place in the Galaxy was.
There were nearly twenty-five million inhabited planets in the Galaxy then, and not one but
owed allegiance to the Empire whose seat was on Trantor. It was the last halfcentury in which
that could be said.
To Gaal, this trip was the undoubted climax of his young, scholarly life. He had been in space
before so that the trip, as a voyage and nothing more, meant little to him. To be sure, he had
traveled previously only as far as Synnax's only satellite in order to get the data on the
mechanics of meteor driftage which he needed for his dissertation, but space-travel was all one
whether one travelled half a million miles, or as many light years.
He had steeled himself just a little for the Jump through hyper-space, a phenomenon one did
not experience in simple interplanetary trips. The Jump remained, and would probably remain
forever, the only practical method of travelling between the stars. Travel through ordinary space
could proceed at no rate more rapid than that of ordinary light (a bit of scientific knowledge that
belonged among the items known since the forgotten dawn of human history), and that would
have meant years of travel between even the nearest of inhabited systems. Through
hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy,
something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two
neighboring instants of time.
Gaal had waited for the first of those Jumps with a little dread curled gently in his stomach, and
it ended in nothing more than a trifling jar, a little internal kick which ceased an instant before
he could be sure he had felt it. That was all.
And after that, there was only the ship, large and glistening; the cool production of 12,000 years
of Imperial progress; and himself, with his doctorate in mathematics freshly obtained and an
invitation from the great Hari Seldon to come to Trantor and join the vast and somewhat
mysterious Seldon Project.
What Gaal was waiting for after the disappointment of the Jump was that first sight of Trantor.
He haunted the View-room. The steel shutter-lids were rolled back at announced times and he
was always there, watching the hard brilliance of the stars, enjoying the incredible hazy swarm
of a star cluster, like a giant conglomeration of fire-flies caught in mid-motion and stilled forever,
At one time there was the cold, blue-white smoke of a gaseous nebula within five light years of
the ship, spreading over the window like distant milk, filling the room with an icy tinge, and
disappearing out of sight two hours later, after another Jump.
The first sight of Trantor's sun was that of a hard, white speck all but lost in a myriad such, and
recognizable only because it was pointed out by the ship's guide. The stars were thick here
near the Galactic center. But with each Jump, it shone more brightly, drowning out the rest,
paling them and thinning them out.
An officer came through and said, "View-room will be closed for the remainder of the trip.
Prepare for landing."
Gaal had followed after, clutching at the sleeve of the white uniform with the
Spaceship-and-Sun of the Empire on it.
He said, "Would it be possible to let me stay? I would like to see Trantor."
The officer smiled and Gaal flushed a bit. It occurred to him that he spoke with a provincial
accent.
The officer said, "We'll be landing on Trantor by morning."
"I mean I want to see it from Space."
"Oh. Sorry, my boy. If this were a space-yacht we might manage it. But we're spinning down,
sunside. You wouldn't want to be blinded, burnt, and radiation-scarred all at the same time,
would you?"
Gaal started to walk away.
The officer called after him, "Trantor would only be gray blur anyway, Kid. Why don't you take a
space-tour once you hit Trantor. They're cheap."
Gaal looked back, "Thank you very much."
It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a
child, and there was a lump in Gaal's throat. He had never seen Trantor spread out in all its
incredibility, as large as life, and he hadn't expected to have to wait longer.
2 .
The ship landed in a medley of noises. There was the far-off hiss of the atmosphere cutting and
sliding past the metal of the ship. There was the steady drone of the conditioners fighting the
heat of friction, and the slower rumble of the engines enforcing deceleration. There was the
human sound of men and women gathering in the debarkation rooms and the grind of the
hoists lifting baggage, mail, and freight to the long axis of the ship, from which they would be
later moved along to the unloading platform.
Gaal felt the slight jar that indicated the ship no longer had an independent motion of its own.
Ship's gravity had been giving way to planetary gravity for hours. Thousands of passengers had
been sitting patiently in the debarkation rooms which swung easily on yielding force-fields to
accommodate its orientation to the changing direction of the gravitational forces. Now they
were crawling down curving ramps to the large, yawning locks.
Gaal's baggage was minor. He stood at a desk, as it was quickly and expertly taken apart and
put together again. His visa was inspected and stamped. He himself paid no attention.
This was Trantor! The air seemed a little thicker here, the gravity a bit greater, than on his
home planet of Synnax, but he would get used to that. He wondered if he would get used to
immensity.
Debarkation Building was tremendous. The roof was almost lost in the heights. Gaal could
almost imagine that clouds could form beneath its immensity. He could see no opposite wall;
just men and desks and converging floor till it faded out in haze.
The man at the desk was speaking again. He sounded annoyed. He said, "Move on, Dornick."
He had to open the visa, look again, before he remembered the name.
Gaal said, "Where- where-"
The man at the desk jerked a thumb, "Taxis to the right and third left."
Gaal moved, seeing the glowing twists of air suspended high in nothingness and reading,
"TAXIS TO ALL POINTS."
A figure detached itself from anonymity and stopped at the desk, as Gaal left. The man at the
desk looked up and nodded briefly. The figure nodded in return and followed the young
immigrant.
He was in time to hear Gaal's destination.
Gaal found himself hard against a railing.
The small siqn said, "Supervisor." The man to whom the siqn referred did not look up. He said,
"Where to?"
Gaal wasn't sure, but even a few seconds hesitation meant men queuing in line behind him.
The Supervisor looked up, "Where to?"
Gaal's funds were low, but there was only this one night and then he would have a job. He tried
to sound nonchalant, "A good hotel, please."
The Supervisor was unimpressed, "They're all good. Name one."
Gaal said, desperately, "The nearest one, please."
The Supervisor touched a button. A thin line of light formed along the floor, twisting among
others which brightened and dimmed in different colors and shades. A ticket was shoved into
Gaal's hands. It glowed faintly.
The Supervisor said, "One point twelve."
Gaal fumbled for the coins. He said, "Where do I go?"
"Follow the light. The ticket will keep glowing as long as you're pointed in the tight direction."
Gaal looked up and began walking. There were hundreds creeping across the vast floor,
following their individual trails, sifting and straining themselves through intersection points to
arrive at their respective destinations.
His own trail ended. A man in glaring blue and yellow uniform, shining and new in unstainable
plasto-textile, reached for his two bags.
"Direct line to the Luxor," he said.
The man who followed Gaal heard that. He also heard Gaal say, "Fine," and watched him enter
the blunt-nosed vehicle.
The taxi lifted straight up. Gaal stared out the curved, transparent window, marvelling at the
sensation of airflight within an enclosed structure and clutching instinctively at the back of the
driver's seat. The vastness contracted and the people became ants in random distribution. The
scene contracted further and began to slide backward.
There was a wall ahead. It began high in the air and extended upward out of sight. It was
riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels. Gaal's taxi moved toward one then plunged
into it. For a moment, Gaal wondered idly how his driver could pick out one among so many.
There was now only blackness, with nothing but the past-flashing of a colored signal light to
relieve the gloom. The air was full of a rushing sound.
Gaal leaned forward against deceleration then and the taxi popped out of the tunnel and
descended to ground-level once more.
"The Luxor Hotel," said the driver, unnecessarily. He helped Gaal with his baggage, accepted a
tenth-credit tip with a businesslike air, picked up a waiting passenger, and was rising again.
In all this, from the moment of debarkation, there had been no glimpse of sky.
3 .
TRANTOR-...At the beginning of the thirteenth millennium, this tendency reached its climax. As
the center of the imperial Government for unbroken hundreds of generations and located, as it
was, toward the central regions of the Galaxy among the most densely populated and
industrially advanced worlds of the system, it could scarcely help being the densest and richest
clot of humanity the Race had ever seen.
Its urbanization, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All the land surface of
Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was
well in excess of forty billions. This enormous population was devoted almost entirely to the
administrative necessities of Empire, and found themselves all too few for the complications of
the task. (It is to be remembered that the impossibility of proper administration of the Galactic
Empire under the uninspired leadership of the later Emperors was a considerable factor in the
Fall.) Daily, fleets of ships in the tens of thousands brought the produce of twenty agricultural
worlds to the dinner tables of Trantor....
Its dependence upon the outer worlds for food and, indeed, for all necessities of life, made
Trantor increasingly vulnerable to conquest by siege. In the last millennium of the Empire, the
monotonously numerous revolts made Emperor after Emperor conscious of this, and Imperial
policy became little more than the protection of Trantor's delicate jugular vein....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Gaal was not certain whether the sun shone, or, for that matter, whether it was day or night. He
was ashamed to ask. All the planet seemed to live beneath metal. The meal of which he had
just partaken had been labelled luncheon, but there were many planets which lived a standard
timescale that took no account of the perhaps inconvenient alternation of day and night. The
rate of planetary turnings differed, and he did not know that of Trantor.
At first, he had eagerly followed the signs to the "Sun Room" and found it but a chamber for
basking in artificial radiation. He lingered a moment or two, then returned to the Luxor's main
lobby.
He said to the room clerk, "Where can I buy a ticket for a planetary tour?"
"Right here."
"When will it start?"
"You just missed it. Another one tomorrow. Buy a ticket now and we'll reserve a place for you."
"Oh." Tomorrow would be too late. He would have to be at the University tomorrow. He said,
"There wouldn't be an observation tower - or something? I mean, in the open air."
"Sure! Sell you a ticket for that, if you want. Better let me check if it's raining or not." He closed
a contact at his elbow and read the flowing letters that raced across a frosted screen. Gaal read
with him.
The room clerk said, "Good weather. Come to think of it, I do believe it's the dry season now."
He added, conversationally, "I don't bother with the outside myself. The last time I was in the
open was three years ago. You see it once, you know and that's all there is to it. Here's your
ticket. Special elevator in the rear. It's marked 'To the Tower.' Just take it."
The elevator was of the new sort that ran by gravitic repulsion. Gaal entered and others flowed
in behind him. The operator closed a contact. For a moment, Gaal felt suspended in space as
gravity switched to zero, and then he had weight again in small measure as the elevator
accelerated upward. Deceleration followed and his feet left the floor. He squawked against his
will.
The operator called out, "Tuck your feet under the railing. Can't you read the sign?"
The others had done so. They were smiling at him as he madly and vainly tried to clamber back
down the wall. Their shoes pressed upward against the chromium of the railings that stretched
across the floor in parallels set two feet apart. He had noticed those railings on entering and
had ignored them.
Then a hand reached out and pulled him down.
He gasped his thanks as the elevator came to a halt.
He stepped out upon an open terrace bathed in a white brilliance that hurl his eyes. The man,
whose helping hand he had just now been the recipient of, was immediately behind him.
The man said, kindly, "Plenty of seats."
Gaal closed his mouth; he had been gaping; and said, "It certainly seems so." He started for
them automatically, then stopped.
He said, "If you don't mind, I'll just stop a moment at the railing. I - I want to look a bit."
The man waved him on, good-naturedly, and Gaal leaned out over the shoulder-high railing
and bathed himself in all the panorama.
He could not see the ground. It was lost in the ever increasing complexities of man-made
structures. He could see no horizon other than that of metal against sky, stretching out to
almost uniform grayness, and he knew it was so over all the land-surface of the planet. There
was scarcely any motion to be seen - a few pleasure-craft lazed against the sky-but all the
busy traffic of billions of men were going on, he knew, beneath the metal skin of the world.
There was no green to be seen; no green, no soil, no life other than man. Somewhere on the
world, he realized vaguely, was the Emperor's palace, set amid one hundred square miles of
natural soil, green with trees, rainbowed with flowers. It was a small island amid an ocean of
steel, but it wasn't visible from where he stood. It might be ten thousand miles away. He did not
know.
Before very long, he must have his tour!
He sighed noisily, and realized finally that he was on Trantor at last; on the planet which was
the center of all the Galaxy and the kernel of the human race. He saw none of its weaknesses.
He saw no ships of food landing. He was not aware of a jugular vein delicately connecting the
forty billion of Trantor with the rest of the Galaxy. He was conscious only of the mightiest deed
of man; the complete and almost contemptuously final conquest of a world.
He came away a little blank-eyed. His friend of the elevator was indicating a seat next to
himself and Gaal took it.
The man smiled. "My name is Jerril. First time on Trantor?"
"Yes, Mr. Jerril."
"Thought so. Jerril's my first name. Trantor gets you if you've got the poetic temperament.
Trantorians never come up here, though. They don't like it. Gives them nerves."
"Nerves! - My name's Gaal, by the way. Why should it give them nerves? It's glorious."
"Subjective matter of opinion, Gaal. If you're born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and
work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing
but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown. They make the children come up
here once a year, after they're five. I don't know if it does any good. They don't get enough of it,
really, and the first few times they scream themselves into hysteria. They ought to start as soon
as they're weaned and have the trip once a week."
He went on, "Of course, it doesn't really matter. What if they never come out at all? They're
happy down there and they run the Empire. How high up do you think we are?"
He said, "Half a mile?" and wondered if that sounded naive.
It must have, for Jerril chuckled a little. He said, "No. Just five hundred feet."
"What? But the elevator took about
"I know. But most of the time it was just getting up to ground level. Trantor is tunneled over a
mile down. It's like an iceberg. Nine-tenths of it is out of sight. It even works itself out a few
miles into the sub-ocean soil at the shorelines. In fact, we're down so low that we can make use
of the temperature difference between ground level and a couple of miles under to supply us
with all the energy we need. Did you know that?"
"No, I thought you used atomic generators."
"Did once. But this is cheaper."
"I imagine so."
"What do you think of it all?" For a moment, the man's good nature evaporated into
shrewdness. He looked almost sly.
Gaal fumbled. "Glorious," he said, again.
"Here on vacation? Traveling? Sight-seeing?"
"No exactly. At least, I've always wanted to visit Trantor but I came here primarily for a job."
"Oh?"
Gaal felt obliged to explain further, "With Dr. Seldon's project at the University of Trantor."
"Raven Seldon?"
"Why, no. The one I mean is Hari Seldon. -The psychohistorian Seldon. I don't know of any
Raven Seldon."
"Hari's the one I mean. They call him Raven. Slang, you know. He keeps predicting disaster."
"He does?" Gaal was genuinely astonished.
"Surely, you must know." Jerril was not smiling. "You're coming to work for him, aren't you?"
"Well, yes, I'm a mathematician. Why does he predict disaster? What kind of disaster?"
"What kind would you think?"
"I'm afraid I wouldn't have the least idea. I've read the papers Dr. Seldon and his group have
published. They're on mathematical theory."
"Yes, the ones they publish."
Gaal felt annoyed. He said, "I think I'll go to my room now. Very pleased to have met you."
Jerril waved his arm indifferently in farewell.
Gaal found a man waiting for him in his room. For a moment, he was too startled to put into
words the inevitable, "What are you doing here?" that came to his lips.
The man rose. He was old and almost bald and he walked with a limp, but his eyes were very
bright and blue.
He said, "I am Hari Seldon," an instant before Gaal's befuddled brain placed the face alongside
the memory of the many times he had seen it in pictures.
4 .
PSYCHOHISTORY-.. .Gaal Dornick, using nonmathematical concepts, has defined
psychohistory to be that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human
conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli....
... Implicit in all these definitions is the assumption that the human conglomerate being dealt
with is sufficiently large for valid statistical treatment. The necessary size of such a
conglomerate may be determined by Seldon 's First Theorem which ...A further necessary
assumption is that the human conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistoric analysis in
order that its reactions be truly random ...
The basis of all valid psychohistory lies in the development of the Seldon. Functions which
exhibit properties congruent to those of such social and economic forces as ...
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
"Good afternoon, sir," said Gaal. "I- I-"
"You didn't think we were to meet before tomorrow? Ordinarily, we would not have. It is just that
if we are to use your services, we must work quickly. It grows continually more difficult to obtain
recruits."
"I don't understand, sir."
"You were talking to a man on the observation tower, were you not?"
"Yes. His first name is Jerril. I know no more about him. "
"His name is nothing. He is an agent of the Commission of Public Safety. He followed you from
the space-port."
"But why? I am afraid I am very confused."
"Did the man on the tower say nothing about me?"
Gaal hesitated, "He referred to you as Raven Seldon."
"Did he say why?"
"He said you predict disaster."
"I do. What does Trantor mean to you?"
Everyone seemed to be asking his opinion of Trantor. Gaal felt incapable of response beyond
the bare word, "Glorious."
"You say that without thinking. What of psychohistory?"
"I haven't thought of applying it to the problem."
"Before you are done with me, young man, you will learn to apply psychohistory to all problems
as a matter of course. -Observe." Seldon removed his calculator pad from the pouch at his
belt. Men said he kept one beneath his pillow for use in moments of wakefulness. Its gray,
glossy finish was slightly worn by use. Seldon's nimble fingers, spotted now with age, played
along the files and rows of buttons that filled its surface. Red symbols glowed out from the
upper tier.
He said, "That represents the condition of the Empire at present."
He waited.
Gaal said finally, "Surely that is not a complete representation."
"No, not complete," said Seldon. "I am glad you do not accept my word blindly. However, this is
an approximation which will serve to demonstrate the proposition. Will you accept that?"
"Subject to my later verification of the derivation of the function, yes." Gaal was carefully
avoiding a possible trap.
"Good. Add to this the known probability of Imperial assassination, viceregal revolt, the
contemporary recurrence of periods of economic depression, the declining rate of planetary
explorations, the. . ."
He proceeded. As each item was mentioned, new symbols sprang to life at his touch, and
melted into the basic function which expanded and changed.
Gaal stopped him only once. "I don't see the validity of that set-transformation."
Seldon repeated it more slowly.
Gaal said, "But that is done by way of a forbidden sociooperation."
"Good. You are quick, but not yet quick enough. It is not forbidden in this connection. Let me do
it by expansions."
The procedure was much longer and at its end, Gaal said, humbly, "Yes, I see now."
Finally, Seldon stopped. "This is Trantor three centuries from now. How do you interpret that?
Eh?" He put his head to one side and waited.
Gaal said, unbelievingly, "Total destruction! But - but that is impossible. Trantor has never
been -"
Seldon was filled with the intense excitement of a man whose body only had grown old. "Come,
come. You saw how the result was arrived at. Put it into words. Forget the symbolism for a
moment."
Gaal said, "As Trantor becomes more specialized, it be comes more vulnerable, less able to
defend itself. Further, as it becomes more and more the administrative center of Empire, it
becomes a greater prize. As the Imperial succession becomes more and more uncertain, and
the feuds among the great families more rampant, social responsibility disappears. "
"Enough. And what of the numerical probability of total destruction within three centuries?"
"I couldn't tell."
"Surely you can perform a field-differentiation?"
Gaal felt himself under pressure. He was not offered the calculator pad. It was held a foot from
his eyes. He calculated furiously and felt his forehead grow slick with sweat.
He said, "About 85%?"
"Not bad," said Seldon, thrusting out a lower lip, "but not good. The actual figure is 92.5%."
Gaal said, "And so you are called Raven Seldon? I have seen none of this in the journals."
"But of course not. This is unprintable. Do you suppose the Imperium could expose its
shakiness in this manner. That is a very simple demonstration in psychohistory. But some of
our results have leaked out among the aristocracy."
"That's bad."
"Not necessarily. All is taken into account."
"But is that why I'm being investigated?"
"Yes. Everything about my project is being investigated."
"Are you in danger, sir?"
"Oh, yes. There is probability of 1 .7% that I will be executed, but of course that will not stop the
project. We have taken that into account as well. Well, never mind. You will meet me, I
suppose, at the University tomorrow?"
"I will," said Gaal.
5 .
COMMISSION OF PUBLIC SAFETY-... The aristocratic coterie rose to power after the
assassination of Cleon I, last of the Entuns. In the main, they formed an element of order during
the centuries of instability and uncertainty in the Imperium. Usually under the control of the
great families of the Chens and the Divarts, it degenerated eventually into a blind instrument for
maintenance of the status quo.... They were not completely removed as a power in the state
until after the accession of the last strong Emperor, Cleon H. The first Chief Commissioner....
... In a way, the beginning of the Commission's decline can be traced to the trial of Fiari Seldon
two years before the beginning of the Foundational Era. That trial is described in Gaal Dornick's
biography of Fiari Seldon....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Gaal did not carry out his promise. He was awakened the next morning by a muted buzzer. He
answered it, and the voice of the desk clerk, as muted, polite and deprecating as it well might
be, informed him that he was under detention at the orders of the Commission of Public Safety.
Gaal sprang to the door and found it would no longer open. He could only dress and wait.
They came for him and took him elsewhere, but it was still detention. They asked him questions
most politely. It was all very civilized. He explained that he was a provincial of Synnax; that he
had attended such and such schools and obtained a Doctor of Mathematics degree on such
and such a date. He had applied for a position on Dr. Seldon's staff and had been accepted.
Over and over again, he gave these details; and over and over again, they returned to the
question of his joining the Seldon Project. How had he heard of it; what were to be his duties;
what secret instructions had he received; what was it all about?
He answered that he did not know. He had no secret instructions. He was a scholar and a
mathematician. He had no interest in politics.
And finally the gentle inquisitor asked, "When will Trantor be destroyed?"
Gaal faltered, "I could not say of my own knowledge."
"Could you say of anyone's?"
"How could I speak for another?" He felt warm; overwarm.
The inquisitor said, "Has anyone told you of such destruction; set a date?" And, as the young
man hesitated, he went on, "You have been followed, doctor. We were at the airport when you
arrived; on the observation tower when you waited for your appointment; and, of course, we
were able to overhear your conversation with Dr. Seldon."
Gaal said, "Then you know his views on the matter."
"Perhaps. But we would like to hear them from you."
"He is of the opinion that Trantor would be destroyed within three centuries."
"He proved it, - uh - mathematically?"
"Yes, he did," - defiantly.
"You maintain the - uh - mathematics to be valid, I suppose.
"If Dr. Seldon vouches for it, it is valid."
"Then we will return."
"Wait. I have a right to a lawyer. I demand my rights as an Imperial citizen."
"You shall have them."
And he did.
It was a tall man that eventually entered, a man whose face seemed all vertical lines and so
thin that one could wonder whether there was room for a smile.
Gaal looked up. He felt disheveled and wilted. So much had happened, yet he had been on
Trantor not more than thirty hours.
The man said, "I am Lors Avakim. Dr. Seldon has directed me to represent you."
"Is that so? Well, then, look here. I demand an instant appeal to the Emperor. I'm being held
without cause. I'm innocent of anything. Of anything." He slashed his hands outward, palms
down, "You've got to arrange a hearing with the Emperor, instantly."
Avakim was carefully emptying the contents of a flat folder onto the floor. If Gaal had had the
stomach for it, he might have recognized Cellomet legal forms, metal thin and tapelike, adapted
for insertion within the smallness of a personal capsule. He might also have recognized a
pocket recorder.
Avakim, paying no attention to Gaal's outburst, finally looked up. He said, "The Commission
will, of course, have a spy beam on our conversation. This is against the law, but they will use
one nevertheless."
Gaal ground his teeth.
"However," and Avakim seated himself deliberately, "the recorder I have on the table, - which
is a perfectly ordinary recorder to all appearances and performs it duties well - has the
additional property of completely blanketing the spy beam. This is something they will not find
out at once."
"Then I can speak."
"Of course."
"Then I want a hearing with the Emperor."
Avakim smiled frostily, and it turned out that there was room for it on his thin face after all. His
cheeks wrinkled to make the room. He said, "You are from the provinces."
"I am none the less an Imperial citizen. As good a one as you or as any of this Commission of
Public Safety."
"No doubt; no doubt. It is merely that, as a provincial, you do not understand life on Trantor as it
is, There are no hearings before the Emperor."
"To whom else would one appeal from this Commission? Is there other procedure?"
"None. There is no recourse in a practical sense. Legalistically, you may appeal to the
Emperor, but you would get no hearing. The Emperor today is not the Emperor of an Entun
dynasty, you know. Trantor, I am afraid is in the hands of the aristocratic families, members of
which compose the Commission of Public Safety. This is a development which is well predicted
by psychohistory."
Gaal said, "Indeed? In that case, if Dr. Seldon can predict the history of Trantor three hundred
years into the future
"He can predict it fifteen hundred years into the future."
"Let it be fifteen thousand. Why couldn't he yesterday have predicted the events of this morning
and warned me. -No, I'm sorry." Gaal sat down and rested his head in one sweating palm, "I
quite understand that psychohistory is a statistical science and cannot predict the future of a
single man with any accuracy. You'll understand that I'm upset."
"But you are wrong. Dr. Seldon was of the opinion that you would be arrested this morning."
"What!"
"It is unfortunate, but true. The Commission has been more and more hostile to his activities.
New members joining the group have been interfered with to an increasing extent. The graphs
showed that for our purposes, matters might best be brought to a climax now. The Commission
of itself was moving somewhat slowly so Dr. Seldon visited you yesterday for the purpose of
forcing their hand. No other reason."
Gaal caught his breath, "I resent-"
"Please. It was necessary. You were not picked for any personal reasons. You must realize that
Dr. Seldon's plans, which are laid out with the developed mathematics of over eighteen years
include all eventualities with significant probabilities. This is one of them. I've been sent here for
no other purpose than to assure you that you need not fear. It will end well; almost certainly so
for the project; and with reasonable probability for you."
"What are the figures?" demanded Gaal.
"For the project, over 99.9%."
"And for myself?"
"I am instructed that this probability is 77.2%."
"Then I've got better than one chance in five of being sentenced to prison or to death."
"The last is under one per cent."
"Indeed. Calculations upon one man mean nothing. You send Dr. Seldon to me."
"Unfortunately, I cannot. Dr. Seldon is himself arrested."
The door was thrown open before the rising Gaal could do more than utter the beginning of a
cry. A guard entered, walked to the table, picked up the recorder, looked upon all sides of it and
put it in his pocket.
Avakim said quietly, "I will need that instrument."
"We will supply you with one, Counsellor, that does not cast a static field."
"My interview is done, in that case."
Gaal watched him leave and was alone.
6 .
The trial (Gaal supposed it to be one, though it bore little resemblance legalistically to the
elaborate trial techniques Gaal had read of) had not lasted long. It was in its third day. Yet
already, Gaal could no longer stretch his memory back far enough to embrace its beginning.
He himself had been but little pecked at. The heavy guns were trained on Dr. Seldon himself.
Hari Seldon, however, sat there unperturbed. To Gaal, he was the only spot of stability
remaining in the world.
The audience was small and drawn exclusively from among the Barons of the Empire. Press
and public were excluded and it was doubtful that any significant number of outsiders even
knew that a trial of Seldon was being conducted. The atmosphere was one of unrelieved
hostility toward the defendants.
Five of the Commission of Public Safety sat behind the raised desk. They wore scarlet and gold
uniforms and the shining, close-fitting plastic caps that were the sign of their judicial function. In
the center was the Chief Commissioner Linge Chen. Gaal had never before seen so great a
Lord and he watched him with fascination. Chen, throughout the trial, rarely said a word. He
made it quite clear that much speech was beneath his dignity.
The Commission's Advocate consulted his notes and the examination continued, with Seldon
still on the stand:
Q. Let us see, Dr. Seldon. How many men are now engaged in the project of which you are
head?
A. Fifty mathematicians.
Q. Including Dr. Gaal Dornick?
A. Dr. Dornick is the fifty-first,
Q. Oh, we have fifty-one then? Search your memory, Dr. Seldon. Perhaps there are fifty-two or
fifty-three? Or perhaps even more?
A. Dr. Dornick has not yet formally joined my organization. When he does, the membership will
be fifty-one. It is now fifty, as I have said.
Q. Not perhaps nearly a hundred thousand?
A. Mathematicians? No.
Q. I did not say mathematicians. Are there a hundred thousand in all capacities?
A. In all capacities, your figure may be correct.
Q. May be? I say it is. I say that the men in your project number ninety-eight thousand, five
hundred and seventy-two.
A. I believe you are counting women and children.
Q. (raising his voice) Ninety eight thousand five hundred and seventy-two individuals is the
intent of my statement. There is no need to quibble.
A. I accept the figures.
Q. (referring to his notes) Let us drop that for the moment, then, and take up another matter
which we have already discussed at some length. Would you repeat, Dr. Seldon, your thoughts
concerning the future of Trantor?
A. I have said, and I say again, that Trantor will lie in ruins within the next three centuries.
Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one?
A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.
Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth?
A. I am.
Q. On what basis?
A. On the basis of the mathematics of psychohistory.
Q. Can you prove that this mathematics is valid'?
A. Only to another mathematician.
Q. (with a smile) Your claim then is that your truth is of so esoteric a nature that it is beyond the
understanding of a plain man. It seems to me that truth should be clearer than that, less
mysterious, more open to the mind.
A. It presents no difficulties to some minds. The physics of energy transfer, which we know as
thermodynamics, has been clear and true through all the history of man since the mythical
ages, yet there may be people present who would find it impossible to design a power engine.
People of high intelligence, too. I doubt if the learned Commissioners-
At this point, one of the Commissioners leaned toward the Advocate. His words were not heard
but the hissing of the voice carried a certain asperity. The Advocate flushed and interrupted
Seldon.
Q. We are not here to listen to speeches, Dr. Seldon. Let us assume that you have made your
point. Let me suggest to you that your predictions of disaster might be intended to destroy
public confidence in the Imperial Government for purposes of your own.
A. That is not so.
Q. Let me suggest that you intend to claim that a period of time preceding the so-called ruin of
Trantor will be filled with unrest of various types.
A. That is correct.
Q. And that by the mere prediction thereof, you hope to bring it about, and to have then an
army of a hundred thousand available.
A. In the first place, that is not so. And if it were, investigation will show you that barely ten
thousand are men of military age, and none of these has training in arms.
Q. Are you acting as an agent for another?
A. I am not in the pay of any man, Mr. Advocate.
Q. You are entirely disinterested? You are serving science?
A. I am.
Q. Then let us see how. Can the future be changed, Dr. Seldon?
A. Obviously. This courtroom may explode in the next few hours, or it may not. If it did, the
future would undoubtedly be changed in some minor respects.
Q. You quibble, Dr. Seldon. Can the overall history of the human race be changed?
A. Yes.
Q. Easily?
A. No. With great difficulty.
Q. Why?
A. The psychohistoric trend of a planet-full of people contains a huge inertia. To be changed it
must be met with something possessing a similar inertia. Either as many people must be
concerned, or if the number of people be relatively small, enormous time for change must be
allowed. Do you understand?
Q. I think I do. Trantor need not be ruined, if a great many people decide to act so that it will
not.
A. That is right.
Q. As many as a hundred thousand people?
A. No, sir. That is far too few.
Q. You are sure?
A. Consider that Trantor has a population of over forty billions. Consider further that the trend
leading to ruin does not belong to Trantor alone but to the Empire as a whole and the Empire
contains nearly a quintillion human beings.
Q. I see. Then perhaps a hundred thousand people can change the trend, if they and their
descendants labor for three hundred years.
A. I'm afraid not. Three hundred years is too short a time.
Q. Ah! In that case, Dr. Seldon, we are left with this deduction to be made from your
statements. You have gathered one hundred thousand people within the confines of your
project. These are insufficient to change the history of Trantor within three hundred years. In
other words, they cannot prevent the destruction of Trantor no matter what they do.
A. You are unfortunately correct.
Q. And on the other hand, your hundred thousand are intended for no illegal purpose.
A. Exactly.
Q. (slowly and with satisfaction) In that case, Dr. Seldon- Now attend, sir, most carefully, for we
want a considered answer. What is the purpose of your hundred thousand?
The Advocate's voice had grown strident. He had sprung his trap; backed Seldon into a comer;
driven him astutely from any possibility of answering.
There was a rising buzz of conversation at that which swept the ranks of the peers in the
audience and invaded even the row of Commissioners. They swayed toward one another in
their scarlet and gold, only the Chief remaining uncorrupted.
Hari Seldon remained unmoved. He waited for the babble to evaporate.
A. To minimize the effects of that destruction.
Q. And exactly what do you mean by that?
A. The explanation is simple. The coming destruction of Trantor is not an event in itself, isolated
in the scheme of human development. It will be the climax to an intricate drama which was
begun centuries ago and which is accelerating in pace continuously. I refer, gentlemen, to the
developing decline and fall of the Galactic Empire.
The buzz now became a dull roar. The Advocate, unheeded, was yelling, "You are openly
declaring that-" and stopped because the cries of "Treason" from the audience showed that the
point had been made without any hammering.
Slowly, the Chief Commissioner raised his gavel once and let it drop. The sound was that of a
mellow gong. When the reverberations ceased, the gabble of the audience also did. The
Advocate took a deep breath.
Q. (theatrically) Do you realize, Dr. Seldon, that you are speaking of an Empire that has stood
for twelve thousand years, through all the vicissitudes of the generations, and which has behind
it the good wishes and love of a quadrillion human beings?
A. I am aware both of the present status and the past history of the Empire. Without disrespect,
I must claim a far better knowledge of it than any in this room.
Q. And you predict its ruin?
A. It is a prediction which is made by mathematics. I pass no moral judgements. Personally, I
regret the prospect. Even if the Empire were admitted to be a bad thing (an admission I do not
make), the state of anarchy which would follow its fall would be worse. It is that state of anarchy
which my project is pledged to fight. The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing,
however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a
freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity - a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I
have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.
Q. Is it not obvious to anyone that the Empire is as strong as it ever was?
A. The appearance of strength is all about you. It would seem to last forever. However, Mr.
Advocate, the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two,
has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of
the Empire even now. Listen with the ears of psychohistory, and you will hear the creaking.
Q. (uncertainly) We are not here, Dr. Seldon, to lis—
A. (firmly) The Empire will vanish and all its good with it. Its accumulated knowledge will decay
and the order it has imposed will vanish. Interstellar wars will be endless; interstellar trade will
decay; population will decline; worlds will lose touch with the main body of the Galaxy. -And so
matters will remain.
Q. (a small voice in the middle of a vast silence) Forever?
A. Psychohistory, which can predict the fall, can make statements concerning the succeeding
dark ages. The Empire, gentlemen, as has just been said, has stood twelve thousand years.
The dark ages to come will endure not twelve, but thirty thousand years. A Second Empire will
rise, but between it and our civilization will be one thousand generations of suffering humanity.
We must fight that.
Q. (recovering somewhat) You contradict yourself. You said earlier that you could not prevent
the destruction of Trantor; hence, presumably, the fall; -the so-called fall of the Empire.
A. I do not say now that we can prevent the fall. But it is not yet too late to shorten the
interregnum which will follow. It is possible, gentlemen, to reduce the duration of anarchy to a
single millennium, if my group is allowed to act now. We are at a delicate moment in history.
The huge, onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little, - just a little - It cannot be
much, but it may be enough to remove twenty-nine thousand years of misery from human
history.
Q. How do you propose to do this?
A. By saving the knowledge of the race. The sum of human knowing is beyond any one man;
any thousand men. With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million
pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know. They will
be helpless and useless by themselves. The bits of lore, meaningless, will not be passed on.
They will be lost through the generations. But, if we now prepare a giant summary of all
knowledge, it will never be lost. Coming generations will build on it, and will not have to
rediscover it for themselves. One millennium will do the work of thirty thousand.
Q. All this
A. All my project; my thirty thousand men with their wives and children, are devoting
themselves to the preparation of an "Encyclopedia Galactica." They will not complete it in their
lifetimes. I will not even live to see it fairly begun. But by the time Trantor falls, it will be
complete and copies will exist in every major library in the Galaxy.
The Chief Commissioner's gavel rose and fell. Hari Seldon left the stand and quietly took his
seat next to Gaal.
He smiled and said, "How did you like the show?"
Gaal said, "You stole it. But what will happen now?"
"They'll adjourn the trial and try to come to a private agreement with me."
"How do you know?"
Seldon said, "I'll be honest. I don't know. It depends on the Chief Commissioner. I have studied
him for years. I have tried to analyze his workings, but you know how risky it is to introduce the
vagaries of an individual in the psychohistoric equations. Yet I have hopes."
7 .
Avakim approached, nodded to Gaal, leaned over to whisper to Seldon. The cry of adjournment
rang out, and guards separated them. Gaal was led away.
The next day's hearings were entirely different. Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick were alone with
the Commission. They were seated at a table together, with scarcely a separation between the
five judges and the two accused. They were even offered cigars from a box of iridescent plastic
which had the appearance of water, endlessly flowing. The eyes were fooled into seeing the
motion although the fingers reported it to be hard and dry.
Seldon accepted one; Gaal refused.
Seldon said, "My lawyer is not present."
A Commissioner replied, "This is no longer a trial, Dr. Seldon. We are here to discuss the safety
of the State.
Linge Chen said, "I will speak," and the other Commissioners sat back in their chairs, prepared
to listen. A silence formed about Chen into which he might drop his words.
Gaal held his breath. Chen, lean and hard, older in looks than in fact, was the actual Emperor
of all the Galaxy. The child who bore the title itself was only a symbol manufactured by Chen,
and not the first such, either.
Chen said, "Dr. Seldon, you disturb the peace of the Emperor's realm. None of the quadrillions
living now among all the stars of the Galaxy will be living a century from now. Why, then, should
we concern ourselves with events of three centuries distance?"
"I shall not be alive half a decade hence," said Seldon, and yet it is of overpowering concern to
me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that mystical generalization to which
we refer by the term, 'humanity.'"
"I do not wish to take the trouble to understand mysticism. Can you tell me why I may not rid
myself of you, and of an uncomfortable and unnecessary three-century future which I will never
see by having you executed tonight?"
"A week ago," said Seldon, lightly, "you might have done so and perhaps retained a one in ten
probability of yourself remaining alive at year's end. Today, the one in ten probability is scarcely
one in ten thousand."
There were expired breaths in the gathering and uneasy stirrings. Gaal felt the short hairs
prickle on the back of his neck. Chen's upper eyelids dropped a little.
"How so?" he said.
"The fall of Trantor," said Seldon, "cannot be stopped by any conceivable effort. It can be
hastened easily, however. The tale of my interrupted trial will spread through the Galaxy.
Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no
promise to them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that
political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feeling will pervade the Galaxy that
only what a man can grasp for himself at that moment will be of any account. Ambitious men
will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the
decay of the worlds. Have me killed and Trantor will fall not within three centuries but within fifty
years and you, yourself, within a single year."
Chen said, "These are words to frighten children, and yet your death is not the only answer
which will satisfy us."
He lifted his slender hand from the papers on which it rested, so that only two fingers touched
lightly upon the topmost sheet.
"Tell me," he said, "will your only activity be that of preparing this encyclopedia you speak of?"
"It will."
"And need that be done on Trantor?"
"Trantor, my lord, possesses the Imperial Library, as well as the scholarly resources of the
University of Trantor."
"And yet if you were located elsewhere- , let us say upon a planet where the hurry and
distractions of a metropolis will not interfere with scholastic musings; where your men may
devote themselves entirely and single-mindedly to their work; -might not that have
advantages?"
"Minor ones, perhaps."
"Such a world had been chosen, then. You may work, doctor, at your leisure, with your hundred
thousand about you. The Galaxy will know that you are working and fighting the Fall. They will
even be told that you will prevent the Fall." Fie smiled, "Since I do not believe in so many things,
it is not difficult for me to disbelieve in the Fall as well, so that I am entirely convinced I will be
telling the truth to the people. And meanwhile, doctor, you will not trouble Trantor and there will
be no disturbance of the Emperor's peace.
"The alternative is death for yourself and for as many of your followers as will seem necessary.
Your earlier threats I disregard. The opportunity for choosing between death and exile is given
you over a time period stretching from this moment to one five minutes hence."
"Which is the world chosen, my lord?" said Seldon.
"It is called, I believe, Terminus," said Chen. Negligently, he turned the papers upon his desk
with his fingertips so that they faced Seldon. "It is uninhabited, but quite habitable, and can be
molded to suit the necessities of scholars. It is somewhat secluded-"
Seldon interrupted, "It is at the edge of the Galaxy, sir."
"As I have said, somewhat secluded. It will suit your needs for concentration. Come, you have
two minutes left."
Seldon said, "We will need time to arrange such a trip. There are twenty thousand families
involved."
"You will be given time."
Seldon thought a moment, and the last minute began to die. Fie said, "I accept exile."
Gaal's heart skipped a beat at the words. For the most part, he was filled with a tremendous joy
for who would not be, to escape death. Yet in all his vast relief, he found space for a little regret
that Seldon had been defeated.
8 .
For a long while, they sat silently as the taxi whined through the hundreds of miles of worm-like
tunnels toward the University. And then Gaal stirred. Fie said:
"Was what you told the Commissioner true? Would your execution have really hastened the
Fall?
Seldon said, "I never lie about psychohistoric findings. Nor would it have availed me in this
case. Chen knew I spoke the truth. He is a very clever politician and politicians by the very
nature of their work must have an instinctive feeling for the truths of psychohistory."
"Then need you have accepted exile," Gaal wondered, but Seldon did not answer.
When they burst out upon the University grounds, Gaal's muscles took action of their own; or
rather, inaction. He had to be carried, almost, out of the taxi.
All the University was a blaze of light. Gaal had almost forgotten that a sun could exist.
The University structures lacked the hard steel-gray of the rest of Trantor. They were silvery,
rather. The metallic luster was almost ivory in color.
Seldon said, "Soldiers, it seems."
"What?" Gaal brought his eyes to the prosaic ground and found a sentinel ahead of them.
They stopped before him, and a soft-spoken captain materialized from a near-by doorway.
He said, "Dr. Seldon?"
"Yes."
"We have been waiting for you. You and your men will be under martial law henceforth. I have
been instructed to inform you that six months will be allowed you for preparations to leave for
Terminus."
"Six months!" began Gaal, but Seldon's fingers were upon his elbow with gentle pressure.
"These are my instructions," repeated the captain.
He was gone, and Gaal turned to Seldon, "Why, what can be done in six months? This is but
slower murder."
"Quietly. Quietly. Let us reach my office."
It was not a large office, but it was quite spy-proof and quite undetectably so. Spy-beams
trained upon it received neither a suspicious silence nor an even more suspicious static. They
received, rather, a conversation constructed at random out of a vast stock of innocuous
phrases in various tones and voices.
"Now," said Seldon, at his ease, "six months will be enough."
"I don't see how."
"Because, my boy, in a plan such as ours, the actions of others are bent to our needs. Have I
not said to you already that Chen's temperamental makeup has been subjected to greater
scrutiny than that of any other single man in history. The trial was not allowed to begin until the
time and circumstances were fight for the ending of our own choosing."
"But could you have arranged-"
"-to be exiled to Terminus? Why not?" He put his fingers on a certain spot on his desk and a
small section of the wall behind him slid aside. Only his own fingers could have done so, since
only his particular print-pattern could have activated the scanner beneath.
"You will find several microfilms inside," said Seldon. "Take the one marked with the letter, T."
Gaal did so and waited while Seldon fixed it within the projector and handed the young man a
pair of eyepieces. Gaal adjusted them, and watched the film unroll before his eyes.
He said, "But then-"
Seldon said, "What surprises you?"
"Have you been preparing to leave for two years?"
"Two and a half. Of course, we could not be certain that it would be Terminus he would choose,
but we hoped it might be and we acted upon that assumption-"
"But why, Dr. Seldon? If you arranged the exile, why? Could not events be far better controlled
here on Trantor?"
"Why, there are some reasons. Working on Terminus, we will have Imperial support without
ever rousing fears that we would endanger Imperial safety."
Gaal said, "But you aroused those fears only to force exile. I still do not understand."
"Twenty thousand families would not travel to the end of the Galaxy of their own will perhaps."
"But why should they be forced there?" Gaal paused, "May I not know?"
Seldon said, "Not yet. It is enough for the moment that you know that a scientific refuge will be
established on Terminus. And another will be established at the other end of the Galaxy, let us
say," and he smiled, "at Star's End. And as for the rest, I will die soon, and you will see more
than I. -No, no. Spare me your shock and good wishes. My doctors tell me that I cannot live
longer than a year or two. But then, I have accomplished in life what I have intended and under
what circumstances may one better die."
"And after you die, sir?"
"Why, there will be successors - perhaps even yourself. And these successors will be able to
apply the final touch in the scheme and instigate the revolt on Anacreon at the right time and in
the right manner. Thereafter, events may roll unheeded."
"I do not understand."
"You will." Seldon's lined face grew peaceful and tired, both at once, "Most will leave for
Terminus, but some will stay. It will be easy to arrange. -But as for me," and he concluded in a
whisper, so that Gaal could scarcely hear him, "I am finished."
PART II
THE ENCYCLOPEDISTS
i.
TERMINUS-... Its location (see map) was an odd one for the role It was called upon to play In
Galactic history, and yet as many writers have never tired of pointing out, an Inevitable one.
Located on the very fringe of the Galactic spiral, an only planet of an Isolated sun, poor In
resources and negligible In economic value, it was never settled In the five centuries after Its
discovery, until the landing of the Encyclopedists....
It was inevitable that as a new generation grew, Terminus would become something more than
an appendage of the psychohistorians of Trantor. With the Anacreonian revolt and the rise to
power of Salvor Hardin, first of the great line of...
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Lewis Pirenne was busily engaged at his desk in the one well-lit comer of the room. Work had
to be co-ordinated. Effort had to be organized. Threads had to be woven into a pattern.
Fifty years now; fifty years to establish themselves and set up Encyclopedia Foundation
Number One into a smoothly working unit. Fifty years to gather the raw material. Fifty years to
prepare.
It had been done. Five more years would see the publication of the first volume of the most
monumental work the Galaxy had ever conceived. And then at ten-year intervals - regularly -
like clockwork - volume after volume. And with them there would be supplements; special
articles on events of current interest, until—
Pirenne stirred uneasily, as the muted buzzer upon his desk muttered peevishly. Fie had almost
forgotten the appointment. Fie shoved the door release and out of an abstracted comer of one
eye saw the door open and the broad figure of Salvor FHardin enter. Pirenne did not look up.
Hardin smiled to himself. He was in a hurry, but he knew better than to take offense at
Pirenne's cavalier treatment of anything or anyone that disturbed him at his work. He buried
himself in the chair on the other side of the desk and waited.
Pirenne's stylus made the faintest scraping sound as it raced across paper. Otherwise, neither
motion nor sound. And then Hardin withdrew a two-credit coin from his vest pocket. He flipped
it and its stainless-steel surface caught flitters of light as it tumbled through the air. He caught it
and-flipped it again, watching the flashing reflections lazily. Stainless steel made good medium
of exchange on a planet where all metal had to be imported.
Pirenne looked up and blinked. "Stop that!" he said querulously.
"Eh?"
"That infernal coin tossing. Stop it."
"Oh." Hardin pocketed the metal disk. "Tell me when you're ready, will you? I promised to be
back at the City Council meeting before the new aqueduct project is put to a vote."
Pirenne sighed and shoved himself away from the desk. "I'm ready. But I hope you aren't going
to bother me with city affairs. Take care of that yourself, please. The Encyclopedia takes up all
my time."
"Have you heard the news?" questioned Hardin, phlegmatically.
"What news?"
"The news that the Terminus City ultrawave set received two hours ago. The Royal Governor of
the Prefect of Anacreon has assumed the title of king."
"Well? What of it?"
"It means," responded Hardin, "that we're cut off from the inner regions of the Empire. We've
been expecting it but that doesn't make it any more comfortable. Anacreon stands square
across what was our last remaining trade route to Santanni and to Trantor and to Vega itself.
Where is our metal to come from? We haven't managed to get a steel or aluminum shipment
through in six months and now we won't be able to get any at all, except by grace of the King of
Anacreon."
Pirenne tch-tched impatiently. "Get them through him, then."
"But can we? Listen, Pirenne, according to the charter which established this Foundation, the
Board of Trustees of the Encyclopedia Committee has been given full administrative powers. I,
as Mayor of Terminus City, have just enough power to blow my own nose and perhaps to
sneeze if you countersign an order giving me permission. It's up to you and your Board then.
I'm asking you in the name of the City, whose prosperity depends upon uninterrupted
commerce with the Galaxy, to call an emergency meeting-"
"Stop! A campaign speech is out of order. Now, Hardin, the Board of Trustees has not barred
the establishment of a municipal government on Terminus. We understand one to be
necessary because of the increase in population since the Foundation was established fifty
years ago, and because of the increasing number of people involved in non-Encyclopedia
affairs. But that does not mean that the first and only aim of the Foundation is no longer to
publish the definitive Encyclopedia of all human knowledge. We are a State-supported,
scientific institution, Hardin. We cannot - must not -will not interfere in local politics."
"Local politics! By the Emperor's left toe, Pirenne, this is a matter of life and death. The planet,
Terminus, by itself cannot support a mechanized civilization. It lacks metals. You know that. It
hasn't a trace of iron, copper, or aluminum in the surface rocks, and precious little of anything
else. What do you think will happen to the Encyclopedia if this watchmacallum King of
Anacreon clamps down on us?"
"On us? Are you forgetting that we are under the direct control of the Emperor himself? We are
not part of the Prefect of Anacreon or of any other prefect. Memorize that! We are part of the
Emperor's personal domain, and no one touches us. The Empire can protect its own."
"Then why didn't it prevent the Royal Governor of Anacreon from kicking over the traces? And
only Anacreon?
At least twenty of the outermost prefects of the Galaxy, the entire Periphery as a matter of fact,
have begun steering things their own way. I tell you I feel damned uncertain of the Empire and
its ability to protect us."
"Hokum! Royal Governors, Kings - what's the difference? The Empire is always shot through
with a certain amount of politics and with different men pulling this way and that. Governors
have rebelled, and, for that matter, Emperors have been deposed, or assassinated before this.
But what has that to do with the Empire itself? Forget it, Hardin. It's none of our business. We
are first of all and last of all-scientists. And our concern is the Encyclopedia.
Oh, yes, I'd almost forgotten. Hardin!"
"Well?"
"Do something about that paper of yours!" Pirenne's voice was angry.
"The Terminus City Journal? It isn't mine; it's privately owned. What's it been doing?"
"For weeks now it has been recommending that the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of
the Foundation be made the occasion for public holidays and quite inappropriate celebrations."
"And why not? The computoclock will open the Vault in three months. I would call this first
opening a big occasion, wouldn't you?"
"Not for silly pageantry, Hardin. The Vault and its opening concern the Board of Trustees alone.
Anything of importance will be communicated to the people. That is final and please make it
plain to the Journal."
"I'm sorry, Pirenne, but the City Charter guarantees a certain minor matter known as freedom of
the press."
"It may. But the Board of Trustees does not. I am the Emperor's representative on Terminus,
Hardin, and have full powers in this respect."
Hardin's expression became that of a man counting to ten, mentally. He said, grimly: "in
connection with your status as Emperor's representative, then, I have a final piece of news to
give you."
"About Anacreon?" Pirenne's lips tightened. He felt annoyed.
"Yes. A special envoy will be sent to us from Anacreon. In two weeks."
"An envoy? Here? From Anacreon?" Pirenne chewed that. "What for?"
Hardin stood up, and shoved his chair back up against the desk. "I give you one guess." And
he left - quite unceremoniously.
2 .
Anselm haut Rodric - "haut" itself signifying noble blood -Sub-prefect of Pluema and Envoy
Extraordinary of his Highness of Anacreon-plus half a dozen other titleswas met by Salvor
Hardin at the spaceport with all the imposing ritual of a state occasion.
With a tight smile and a low bow, the sub-prefect had flipped his blaster from its holster and
presented it to Hardin butt first. Hardin returned the compliment with, a blaster specifically
borrowed for the occasion. Friendship and good will were thus established, and if Hardin noted
the barest bulge at Haut Rodric's shoulder, he prudently said nothing.
The ground car that received them then - preceded, flanked, and followed by the suitable cloud
of minor functionaries - proceeded in a slow, ceremonious manner to Cyclopedia Square,
cheered on its way by a properly enthusiastic crowd.
Sub-prefect Anselm received the cheers with the complaisant indifference of a soldier and a
nobleman.
He said to Hardin, "And this city is all your world?"
Hardin raised his voice to be heard above the clamor. "We are a young world, your eminence.
In our short history we have had but few members of the higher nobility visiting our poor planet.
Hence, our enthusiasm."
It is certain that "higher nobility" did not recognize irony when he heard it.
He said thoughtfully: "Founded fifty years ago. Hm-m-m! You have a great deal of unexploited
land here, mayor. You have never considered dividing it into estates?"
"There is no necessity as yet. We're extremely centralized; we have to be, because of the
Encyclopedia. Someday, perhaps, when our population has grown-"
"A strange world! You have no peasantry?"
Hardin reflected that it didn't require a great deal of acumen to tell that his eminence was
indulging in a bit of fairly clumsy pumping. He replied casually, "No - nor nobility."
Haut Rodric's eyebrows lifted. "And your leader -the man I am to meet?"
"You mean Dr. Pirenne? Yes! He is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees - and a personal
representative of the Emperor."
"Doctor? No other title? A scholar? And he rates above the civil authority?"
"Why, certainly," replied Hardin, amiably. "We're all scholars more or less. After all, we're not so
much a world as a scientific foundation - under the direct control of the Emperor."
There was a faint emphasis upon the last phrase that seemed to disconcert the sub-prefect. He
remained thoughtfully silent during the rest of the slow way to Cyclopedia Square.
If Hardin found himself bored by the afternoon and evening that followed, he had at least the
satisfaction of realizing that Pirenne and Haut Rodric - having met with loud and mutual
protestations of esteem and regard - were detesting each other's company a good deal more.
Haut Rodric had attended with glazed eye to Pirenne's lecture during the "inspection tour" of
the Encyclopedia Building. With polite and vacant smile, he had listened to the latter's rapid
patter as they passed through the vast storehouses of reference films and the numerous
projection rooms.
It was only after he had gone down level by level into and through the composing departments,
editing departments, publishing departments, and filming departments that he made the first
comprehensive statement.
"This is all very interesting," he said, "but it seems a strange occupation for grown men. What
good is it?"
It was a remark, Hardin noted, for which Pirenne found no answer, though the expression of his
face was most eloquent.
The dinner that evening was much the mirror image of the events of that afternoon, for Haut
Rodric monopolized the conversation by describing - in minute technical detail and with
incredible zest - his own exploits as battalion head during the recent war between Anacreon
and the neighboring newly proclaimed Kingdom of Smyrno.
The details of the sub-prefect's account were not completed until dinner was over and one by
one the minor officials had drifted away. The last bit of triumphant description of mangled
spaceships came when he had accompanied Pirenne and Hardin onto the balcony and relaxed
in the warm air of the summer evening.
"And now," he said, with a heavy joviality, "to serious matters."
"By all means," murmured Hardin, lighting a long cigar of Vegan tobacco - not many left, he
reflected - and teetering his chair back on two legs.
The Galaxy was high in the sky and its misty lens shape stretched lazily from horizon to
horizon. The few stars here at the very edge of the universe were insignificant twinkles in
comparison.
"Of course," said the sub-prefect, "all the formal discussions - the paper signing and such dull
technicalities, that is - will take place before the - What is it you call your Council?"
"The Board of Trustees," replied Pirenne, coldly.
"Queer name! Anyway, that's for tomorrow. We might as well clear away some of the
underbrush, man to man, right now, though. Hey?"
"And this means-" prodded Hardin.
"Just this. There's been a certain change in the situation out here in the Periphery and the
status of your planet has become a trifle uncertain. It would be very convenient if we succeeded
in coming to an understanding as to how the matter stands. By the way, mayor, have you
another one of those cigars?"
Hardin started and produced one reluctantly.
Anselm haut Rodric sniffed at it and emitted a clucking sound of pleasure. "Vegan tobacco!
Where did you get it?"
"We received some last shipment. There's hardly any left. Space knows when we'll get more -
if ever."
Pirenne scowled. He didn't smoke - and, for that matter, detested the odor. "Let me understand
this, your eminence. Your mission is merely one of clarification?"
Haut Rodric nodded through the smoke of his first lusty puffs.
"In that case, it is soon over. The situation with respect to the Encyclopedia Foundation is what
it always has been."
"Ah! And what is it that it always has been?"
"Just this: A State-supported scientific institution and part of the personal domain of his august
majesty, the Emperor."
The sub-prefect seemed unimpressed. He blew smoke rings. "That's a nice theory, Dr. Pirenne.
I imagine you've got charters with the Imperial Seal upon it - but what's the actual situation?
How do you stand with respect to Smyrno? You're not fifty parsecs from Smyrno's capital, you
know. And what about Konom and Daribow?"
Pirenne said: "We have nothing to do with any prefect. As part of the Emperor's-"
"They're not prefects," reminded Haut Rodric; "they're kingdoms now."
"Kingdoms then. We have nothing to do with them. As a scientific institution-"
"Science be damned!" swore the other. "What the devil has that got to do with the fact that
we're liable to see Terminus taken over by Smyrno at any time?"
"And the Emperor? He would just sit by?"
Haut Rodric calmed down and said: "Well, now, Dr. Pirenne, you respect the Emperor's
property and so does Anacreon, but Smyrno might not. Remember, we've just signed a treaty
with the Emperor - I'll present a copy to that Board of yours tomorrow - which places upon us
the responsibility of maintaining order within the borders of the old Prefect of Anacreon on
behalf of the Emperor. Our duty is clear, then, isn't it?"
"Certainly. But Terminus is not part of the Prefect of Anacreon."
"And Smyrno-"
"Nor is it part of the Prefect of Smyrno. It's not part of any prefect."
"Does Smyrno know that?"
I don't care what it knows.
"We do. We've just finished a war with her and she still holds two stellar systems that are ours.
Terminus occupies an extremely strategic spot, between the two nations."
Hardin felt weary. He broke in: "What is your proposition, your eminence?"
The sub-prefect seemed quite ready to stop fencing in favor of more direct statements. He said
briskly: "It seems perfectly obvious that, since Terminus cannot defend itself, Anacreon must
take over the job for its own sake. You understand we have no desire to interfere with internal
administration-"
"Uh-huh," grunted Hardin dryly.
"-but we believe that it would be best for all concerned to have Anacreon establish a military
base upon the planet."
"And that is all you would want - a military base in some of the vast unoccupied territory - and
let it go at that?"
"Well, of course, there would be the matter of supporting the protecting forces."
Hardin's chair came down on all four, and his elbows went forward on his knees. "Now we're
getting to the nub. Let's put it into language. Terminus is to be a protectorate and to pay
tribute."
"Not tribute. Taxes. We're protecting you. You pay for it."
Pirenne banged his hand on the chair with sudden violence. "Let me speak, Hardin. Your
eminence, I don't care a rusty half-credit coin for Anacreon, Smyrno, or all your local politics
and petty wars. I tell you this is a State-supported tax-free institution."
"State-supported? But we are the State, Dr. Pirenne, and we're not supporting."
Pirenne rose angrily. "Your eminence, I am the direct representative of-"
"-his august majesty, the Emperor," chorused Anselm haut Rodric sourly, "And I am the direct
representative of the King of Anacreon. Anacreon is a lot nearer, Dr. Pirenne. "
"Let's get back to business," urged Hardin. "How would you take these so-called taxes, your
eminence? Would you take them in kind: wheat, potatoes, vegetables, cattle?"
The sub-prefect stared. "What the devil? What do we need with those? We've got hefty
surpluses. Gold, of course. Chromium or vanadium would be even better, incidentally, if you
have it in quantity."
Hardin laughed. "Quantity! We haven't even got iron in quantity. Gold! Here, take a look at our
currency." He tossed a coin to the envoy.
Haut Rodric bounced it and stared. "What is it? Steel?"
"That's right."
I don't understand.
"Terminus is a planet practically without metals. We import it all. Consequently, we have no
gold, and nothing to pay unless you want a few thousand bushels of potatoes."
"Well - manufactured goods."
"Without metal? What do we make our machines out of?"
There was a pause and Pirenne tried again. "This whole discussion is wide of the point.
Terminus is not a planet, but a scientific foundation preparing a great encyclopedia. Space,
man, have you no respect for science?"
"Encyclopedias don't win wars." Haut Rodric's brows furrowed. "A completely unproductive
world, then - and practically unoccupied at that. Well, you might pay with land."
"What do you mean?" asked Pirenne.
"This world is just about empty and the unoccupied land is probably fertile. There are many of
the nobility on Anacreon that would like an addition to their estates."
"You can't propose any such-"
"There's no necessity of looking so alarmed, Dr. Pirenne. There's plenty for all of us. If it comes
to what it comes, and you co-operate, we could probably arrange it so that you lose nothing.
Titles can be conferred and estates granted. You understand me, I think."
Pirenne sneered, "Thanks!"
And then Hardin said ingenuously: "Could Anacreon supply us with adequate quantities of
plutonium for our nuclear-power plant? We've only a few years' supply left."
There was a gasp from Pirenne and then a dead silence for minutes. When Haut Rodric spoke
it was in a voice quite different from what it had been till then:
"You have nuclear power?"
"Certainly. What's unusual in that? I imagine nuclear power is fifty thousand years old now.
Why shouldn't we have it? Except that it's a little difficult to get plutonium."
"Yes ... Yes." The envoy paused and added uncomfortably: "Well, gentlemen, we'll pursue the
subject tomorrow. You'll excuse me-"
Pirenne looked after him and gritted through his teeth: "That insufferable, dull-witted donkey!
That-"
Hardin broke in: "Not at all. He's merely the product of his environment. He doesn't understand
much except that 'I have a gun and you haven't.’"
Pirenne whirled on him in exasperation. "What in space did you mean by the talk about military
bases and tribute? Are you crazy?"
"No. I merely gave him rope and let him talk. You'll notice that he managed to stumble out with
Anacreon's real intentions - that is, the parceling up of Terminus into landed estates. Of
course, I don't intend to let that happen."
"You don't intend. You don't. And who are you? And may I ask what you meant by blowing off
your mouth about our nuclear-power plant? Why, it's just the thing that would make us a military
target."
"Yes," grinned Hardin. "A military target to stay away from. Isn't it obvious why I brought the
subject up? It happened to confirm a very strong suspicion I had had."
"And that was what?"
"That Anacreon no longer has a nuclear-power economy. If they had, our friend would
undoubtedly have realized that plutonium, except in ancient tradition is not used in power
plants. And therefore it follows that the rest of the Periphery no longer has nuclear power either.
Certainly Smyrno hasn't, or Anacreon wouldn't have won most of the battles in their recent war.
Interesting, wouldn't you say?"
"Bah!" Pirenne left in fiendish humor, and Hardin smiled gently.
He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. "Back to oil and coal, are
they?" he murmured - and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself.
3 .
When Hardin denied owning the Journal, he was perhaps technically correct, but no more.
Hardin had been the leading spirit in the drive to incorporate Terminus into an autonomous
municipality-he had been elected its first mayor-so it was not surprising that, though not a
single share of Journal stock was in his name, some sixty percent was controlled by him in
more devious fashions.
There were ways.
Consequently, when Hardin began suggesting to Pirenne that he be allowed to attend meetings
of the Board of Trustees, it was not quite coincidence that the Journal began a similar
campaign. And the first mass meeting in the history of the Foundation was held, demanding
representation of the City in the "national" government.
And, eventually, Pirenne capitulated with ill grace.
Hardin, as he sat at the foot of the table, speculated idly as to just what it was that made
physical scientists such poor administrators. It might be merely that they were too used to
inflexible fact and far too unused to pliable people.
In any case, there was Tomaz Sutt and Jord Fara on his left; Lundin Crast and Yate Fulham on
his fight; with Pirenne, himself, presiding. He knew them all, of course, but they seemed to have
put on an extra-special bit of pomposity for the occasion.
Hardin had dozed through the initial formalities and then perked up when Pirenne sipped at the
glass of water before him by way of preparation and said:
"I find it very gratifying to be able to inform the Board that since our last meeting, I have
received word that Lord Dorwin, Chancellor of the Empire, will arrive at Terminus in two weeks.
It may be taken for granted that our relations with Anacreon will be smoothed out to our
complete satisfaction as soon as the Emperor is informed of the situation. "
He smiled and addressed Hardin across the length of the table. "Information to this effect has
been given the Journal."
Hardin snickered below his breath. It seemed evident that Pirenne's desire to strut this
information before him had been one reason for his admission into the sacrosanctum.
He said evenly: "Leaving vague expressions out of account, what do you expect Lord Dorwin to
do?"
Tomaz Sutt replied. He had a bad habit of addressing one in the third person when in his more
stately moods.
"It is quite evident," he observed, "that Mayor Hardin is a professional cynic. He can scarcely
fail to realize that the Emperor would be most unlikely to allow his personal rights to be
infringed."
"Why? What would he do in case they were?"
There was an annoyed stir. Pirenne said, "You are out of order," and, as an afterthought, "and
are making what are near-treasonable statements, besides."
"Am I to consider myself answered?"
"Yes! If you have nothing further to say-"
"Don't jump to conclusions. I'd like to ask a question. Besides this stroke of diplomacy - which
may or may not prove to mean anything - has anything concrete been done to meet the
Anacreonic menace?"
Yate Fulham drew one hand along his ferocious red mustache. "You see a menace there, do
you?"
"Don't you?"
"Scarcely"- this with indulgence. "The Emperor-"
"Great space!" Hardin felt annoyed. "What is this? Every once in a while someone mentions
'Emperor' or 'Empire' as if it were a magic word. The Emperor is thousands of parsecs away,
and I doubt whether he gives a damn about us. And if he does, what can he do? What there
was of the imperial navy in these regions is in the hands of the four kingdoms now and
Anacreon has its share. Listen, we have to fight with guns, not with words.
"Now, get this. We've had two months' grace so far, mainly because we've given Anacreon the
idea that we've got nuclear weapons. Well, we all know that that's a little white lie. We've got
nuclear power, but only for commercial uses, and darn little at that. They're going to find that
out soon, and if you think they're going to enjoy being jollied along, you're mistaken."
"My dear sir-"
"Hold on: I'm not finished." Hardin was warming up. He liked this. "It's all very well to drag
chancellors into this, but it would be much nicer to drag a few great big siege guns fitted for
beautiful nuclear bombs into it. We've lost two months, gentlemen, and we may not have
another two months to lose. What do you propose to do?"
Said Lundin Crast, his long nose wrinkling angrily: "If you're proposing the militarization of the
Foundation, I won't hear a word of it. It would mark our open entrance into the field of politics.
We, Mr. Mayor, are a scientific foundation and nothing else."
Added Sutt: "He does not realize, moreover, that building armaments would mean withdrawing
men - valuable men - from the Encyclopedia. That cannot be done, come what may."
"Very true," agreed Pirenne. "The Encyclopedia first - always."
Hardin groaned in spirit. The Board seemed to suffer violently from Encyclopedia on the brain,
He said icily: "Has it ever occurred to this Board that it is barely possible that Terminus may
have interests other than the Encyclopedia?"
Pirenne replied: "I do not conceive, Hardin, that the Foundation can have any interest other
than the Encyclopedia."
"I didn't say the Foundation; I said Terminus. I'm afraid you don't understand the situation.
There's a good million of us here on Terminus, and not more than a hundred and fifty thousand
are working directly on the Encyclopedia. To the rest of us, this is home. We were born here.
We're living here. Compared with our farms and our homes and our factories, the Encyclopedia
means little to us. We want them protected-"
He was shouted down.
"The Encyclopedia first," ground out Crast. "We have a mission to fulfill."
"Mission, hell," shouted Hardin. "That might have been true fifty years ago. But this is a new
generation."
"That has nothing to do with it," replied Pirenne. "We are scientists."
And Hardin leaped through the opening. "Are you, though? That's a nice hallucination, isn't it?
Your bunch here is a perfect example of what's been wrong with the entire Galaxy for
thousands of years. What kind of science is it to be stuck out here for centuries classifying the
work of scientists of the last millennium? Have you ever thought of working onward, extending
their knowledge and improving upon it? No! You're quite happy to stagnate. The whole Galaxy
is, and has been for space knows how long. That's why the Periphery is revolting; that's why
communications are breaking down; that's why petty wars are becoming eternal; that's why
whole systems are losing nuclear power and going back to barbarous techniques of chemical
power.
If you ask me," he cried, "the Galactic Empire is dying!"
He paused and dropped into his chair to catch his breath, paying no attention to the two or
three that were attempting simultaneously to answer him.
Crast got the floor. "I don't know what you're trying to gain by your hysterical statements, Mr.
Mayor. Certainly, you are adding nothing constructive to the discussion. I move, Mr. Chairman,
that the speaker's remarks be placed out of order and the discussion be resumed from the point
where it was interrupted."
Jord Fara bestirred himself for the first time. Up to this point Fara had taken no part in the
argument even at its hottest. But now his ponderous voice, every bit as ponderous as his
three-hundred-pound body, burst its bass way out.
"Haven't we forgotten something, gentlemen?"
"What?" asked Pirenne, peevishly.
"That in a month we celebrate our fiftieth anniversary." Fara had a trick of uttering the most
obvious platitudes with great profundity.
"What of it?"
"And on that anniversary," continued Fara, placidly, "Hari Seldon's Vault will open. Have you
ever considered what might be in the Vault?"
"I don't know. Routine matters. A stock Speech of congratulations, perhaps. I don't think any
significance need be placed on the Vault - though the Journal'- and he glared at Hardin, who
grinned back -"did try to make an issue of it. I put a stop to that."
"Ah," said Fara, "but perhaps you are wrong. Doesn't it strike you" - he paused and put a finger
to his round little nose -"that the Vault is opening at a very convenient time?"
"Very inconvenient time, you mean," muttered Fulham. "We've got some other things to worry
about."
"Other things more important than a message from Hari Seldon? I think not." Fara was growing
more pontifical than ever, and Hardin eyed him thoughtfully. What was he getting at?
"In fact," said Fara, happily, "you all seem to forget that Seldon was the greatest psychologist of
our time and that he was the founder of our Foundation. It seems reasonable to assume that he
used his science to determine the probable course of the history of the immediate future. If he
did, as seems likely, I repeat, he would certainly have managed to find a way to warn us of
danger and, perhaps, to point out a solution. The Encyclopedia was very dear to his heart, you
know."
An aura of puzzled doubt prevailed. Pirenne hemmed. "Well, now, I don't know. Psychology is a
great science, but-there are no psychologists among us at the moment, I believe. It seems to
me we're on uncertain ground."
Fara turned to Hardin. "Didn't you study psychology under Alurin?"
Hardin answered, half in reverie: "Yes, I never completed my studies, though. I got tired of
theory. I wanted to be a psychological engineer, but we lacked the facilities, so I did the next
best thing - I went into politics. It's practically the same thing."
"Well, what do you think of the Vault?"
And Hardin replied cautiously, "I don't know."
He did not say a word for the remainder of the meeting even though it got back to the subject of
the Chancellor of the Empire.
In fact, he didn't even listen. He'd been put on a new track and things were falling into
place-just a little. Little angles were fitting together - one or two.
And psychology was the key. He was sure of that.
He was trying desperately to remember the psychological theory he had once learned - and
from it he got one thing right at the start.
A great psychologist such as Seldon could unravel human emotions and human reactions
sufficiently to be able to predict broadly the historical sweep of the future.
And what would that mean?
4 .
Lord Dorwin took snuff. He also had long hair, curled intricately and, quite obviously, artificially,
to which were added a pair of fluffy, blond sideburns, which he fondled affectionately. Then,
too, he spoke in overprecise statements and left out all the r's.
At the moment, Hardin had no time to think of more of the reasons for the instant detestation in
which he had held the noble chancellor. Oh, yes, the elegant gestures of one hand with which
he accompanied his remarks and the studied condescension with which he accompanied even
a simple affirmative.
But, at any rate, the problem now was to locate him. He had disappeared with Pirenne half an
hour before - passed clean out of sight, blast him.
Hardin was quite sure that his own absence during the preliminary discussions would quite suit
Pirenne.
But Pirenne had been seen in this wing And on this floor. It was simply a matter of trying every
door. Halfway down, he said, "Ah!" and stepped into the darkened room. The profile of Lord
Dorwin's intricate hair-do was unmistakable against the lighted screen.
Lord Dorwin looked up and said: "Ah, Hahdin. You ah looking foah us, no doubt?" He held out
his snuffbox - overadorned and poor workmanship at that, noted Hardinand was politely
refused whereat he helped himself to a pinch and smiled graciously.
Pirenne scowled and Hardin met that with an expression of blank indifference.
The only sound to break the short silence that followed was the clicking of the lid of Lord
Dorwin's snuffbox. And then he put it away and said:
"A gweat achievement, this Encyclopedia of yoahs, Hahdin. A feat, indeed, to rank with the
most majestic accomplishments of all time."
"Most of us think so, milord. It's an accomplishment not quite accomplished as yet, however."
"Fwom the little I have seen of the efficiency of yoah Foundation, I have no feahs on that
scoah." And he nodded to Pirenne, who responded with a delighted bow.
Quite a love feast, thought Hardin. "I wasn't complaining about the lack of efficiency, milord, as
much as of the definite excess of efficiency on the part of the Anacreonians - though in another
and more destructive direction."
"Ah, yes, Anacweon." A negligent wave of the hand. "I have just come from theah. Most
bahbawous planet. It is thowoughly inconceivable that human beings could live heah in the
Pewiphewy. The lack of the most elementawy wequiahments of a cultuahed gentleman; the
absence of the most fundamental necessities foah comfoht and convenience - the uttah
desuetude into which they-"
Hardin interrupted dryly: "The Anacreonians, unfortunately, have all the elementary
requirements for warfare and all the fundamental necessities for destruction."
"Quite, quite." Lord Dorwin seemed annoyed, perhaps at being stopped midway in his
sentence. "But we ahn't to discuss business now, y'know. Weally, I'm othahwise concuhned.
Doctah Piwenne, ahn't you going to show me the second volume? Do, please."
The lights clicked out and for the next half-hour Hardin might as well have been on Anacreon
for all the attention they paid him. The book upon the screen made little sense to him, nor did
he trouble to make the attempt to follow, but Lord Dorwin became quite humanly excited at
times. Hardin noticed that during these moments of excitement the chancellor pronounced his
r's.
When the lights went on again, Lord Dorwin said: "Mahvelous. Twuly mahvelous. You ah not,
by chance, intewested in ahchaeology, ah you, Hahdin?"
"Eh?" Hardin shook himself out of an abstracted reverie. "No, milord, can't say I am. I'm a
psychologist by original intention and a politician by final decision."
"Ah! No doubt intewesting studies. 1 , myself, y'know" - he helped himself to a giant pinch of
snuff -"dabble in ahchaeology."
"Indeed?"
"His lordship," interrupted Pirenne, "is most thoroughly acquainted with the field."
"Well, p'haps I am, p'haps I am," said his lordship complacently. "I have done an awful amount
of wuhk in the science. Extwemely well-read, in fact. I've gone thwough all of Jawdun, Obijasi,
Kwomwill ... oh, all of them, y'know."
"I've heard of them, of course," said Hardin, "but I've never read them."
"You should some day, my deah fellow. It would amply repay you. Why, I cutainly considah it
well wuhth the twip heah to the Pewiphewy to see this copy of Lameth. Would you believe it,
my Libwawy totally lacks a copy. By the way, Doctah Piwenne, you have not fohgotten yoah
pwomise to twansdevelop a copy foah me befoah I leave?"
"Only too pleased."
"Lameth, you must know," continued the chancellor, politically, "pwesents a new and most
intwesting addition to my pwevious knowledge of the 'Owigin Question.'"
"Which question?" asked Hardin.
"The 'Owigin Question.' The place of the owigin of the human species, y'know. Suahly you must
know that it is thought that owiginally the human wace occupied only one planetawy system."
"Well, yes, I know that."
"Of cohse, no one knows exactly which system it is - lost in the mists of antiquity. Theah ah
theawies, howevah. Siwius, some say. Othahs insist on Alpha Centauwi, oah on Sol, oah on 61
Cygni - all in the Siwius sectah, you see."
"And what does Lameth say?"
"Well, he goes off along a new twail completely. He twies to show that ahchaeological wemains
on the thuhd planet of the Ahctuwian System show that humanity existed theah befoah theah
wah any indications of space-twavel."
"And that means it was humanity's birth planet?"
"P'haps. I must wead it closely and weigh the evidence befoah I can say foah cuhtain. One
must see just how weliable his obsuhvations ah."
Hardin remained silent for a short while. Then he said, "When did Lameth write his book?"
"Oh - I should say about eight hundwed yeahs ago. Of cohse, he has based it lahgely on the
pwevious wuhk of Gleen."
"Then why rely on him? Why not go to Arcturus and study the remains for yourself?"
Lord Dorwin raised his eyebrows and took a pinch of snuff hurriedly. "Why, whatevah foah, my
deah fellow?"
"To get the information firsthand, of course."
"But wheah's the necessity? It seems an uncommonly woundabout and hopelessly
wigmawolish method of getting anywheahs. Look heah, now, I've got the wuhks of all the old
mastahs - the gweat ahchaeologists of the past. I wigh them against each othah - balance the
disagweements - analyze the conflicting statements - decide which is pwobably cowwect -
and come to a conclusion. That is the scientific method. At least" - patronizingly -"as / see it.
How insuffewably cwude it would be to go to Ahctuwus, oah to Sol, foah instance, and blundah
about, when the old mastahs have covahed the gwound so much moah effectually than we
could possibly hope to do."
Hardin murmured politely, "I see."
"Come, milord," said Pirenne, "think we had better be returning."
"Ah, yes. P'haps we had."
As they left the room, Hardin said suddenly, "Milord, may I ask a question?"
Lord Dorwin smiled blandly and emphasized his answer with a gracious flutter of the hand.
"Cuhtainly, my deah fellow. Only too happy to be of suhvice. If I can help you in any way fwom
my pooah stoah of knowledge-"
"It isn't exactly about archaeology, milord."
"No?"
"No. It's this: Last year we received news here in Terminus about the meltdown of a power
plant on Planet V of Gamma Andromeda. We got the barest outline of the accident - no details
at all. I wonder if you could tell me exactly what happened."
Pirenne's mouth twisted. "I wonder you annoy his lordship with questions on totally irrelevant
subjects."
"Not at all, Doctah Piwenne," interceded the chancellor. "It is quite all wight. Theah isn't much to
say concuhning it in any case. The powah plant did undergo meltdown and it was quite a
catastwophe, y'know. I believe wadiatsen damage. Weally, the govuhnment is sewiously
considewing placing seveah westwictions upon the indiscwiminate use of nucleah powah -
though that is not a thing for genewal publication, y'know."
"I understand," said Hardin. "But what was wrong with the plant?"
"Well, weally," replied Lord Dorwin indifferently, "who knows? It had bwoken down some yeahs
pweviously and it is thought that the weplacements and wepaiah wuhk wuh most infewiah. It is
so difficult these days to find men who weally undahstand the moah technical details of ouah
powah systems." And he took a sorrowful pinch of snuff.
"You realize," said Hardin, "that the independent kingdoms of the Periphery had lost nuclear
power altogether?"
"Have they? I'm not at all suhpwised. Bahbawous planets- Oh, but my deah fellow, don't call
them independent. They ahn't, y'know. The tweaties we've made with them ah pwoof positive of
that. They acknowledge the soveweignty of the Empewah. They'd have to, of cohse, oah we
wouldn't tweat with them."
That may be so, but they have considerable freedom of action.
"Yes, I suppose so. Considewable. But that scahcely mattahs. The Empiah is fah bettah off,
with the Pewiphewy thwown upon its own wesoahces - as it is, moah oah less. They ahn't any
good to us, y'know. Most bahbawous planets. Scahcely civilized."
"They were civilized in the past. Anacreon was one of the richest of the outlying provinces. I
understand it compared favorably with Vega itself."
"Oh, but, Hahdin, that was centuwies ago. You can scahcely dwaw conclusion fwom that.
Things wah diffewent in the old gweat days. We ahn't the men we used to be, y'know. But,
Hahdin, come, you ah a most puhsistent chap.
I've told you I simply won't discuss business today. Doctah Piwenne did pwepayah me foah
you. He told me you would twy to badgah me, but I'm fah too old a hand foah that. Leave it foah
next day. And that was that.
5 .
This was the second meeting of the Board that Hardin had attended, if one were to exclude the
informal talks the Board members had had with the now-departed Lord Dorwin. Yet the mayor
had a perfectly definite idea that at least one other, and possibly two or three, had been held, to
which he had somehow never received an invitation.
Nor, it seemed to him, would he have received notification of this one had it not been for the
ultimatum.
At least, it amounted to an ultimatum, though a superficial reading of the visigraphed document
would lead one to suppose that it was a friendly interchange of greetings between two
potentates.
Hardin fingered it gingerly. It started off floridly with a salutation from "His Puissant Majesty, the
King of Anacreon, to his friend and brother, Dr. Lewis Pirenne, Chairman of the Board of
Trustees, of the Encyclopedia Foundation Number One," and it ended even more lavishly with
a gigantic, multicolored seal of the most involved symbolism.
But it was an ultimatum just the same.
Hardin said: "It turned out that we didn't have much time after all - only three months. But little
as it was, we threw it away unused. This thing here gives us a week. What do we do now?"
Pirenne frowned worriedly. "There must be a loophole. It is absolutely unbelievable that they
would push matters to extremities in the face of what Lord Dorwin has assured us regarding the
attitude of the Emperor and the Empire."
Hardin perked up. "I see. You have informed the King of Anacreon of this alleged attitude?"
"I did - after having placed the proposal to the Board for a vote and having received unanimous
consent."
And when did this vote take place?
Pirenne climbed onto his dignity. "I do not believe I am answerable to you in any way, Mayor
Hardin."
"All right. I'm not that vitally interested. It's just my opinion that it was your diplomatic
transmission of Lord Dorwin's valuable contribution to the situation"- he lifted the comer of his
mouth in a sour half-smile -"that was the direct cause of this friendly little note. They might
have delayed longer otherwise - though I don't think the additional time would have helped
Terminus any, considering the attitude of the Board."
Said Yate Fulham: "And just how do you arrive at that remarkable conclusion, Mr. Mayor?"
"In a rather simple way. It merely required the use of that much-neglected commodity -
common sense. You see, there is a branch of human knowledge known as symbolic logic,
which can be used to prune away all sorts of clogging deadwood that clutters up human
language."
"What about it?" said Fulham.
"I applied it. Among other things, I applied it to this document here. I didn't really need to for
myself because I knew what it was all about, but I think I can explain it more easily to five
physical scientists by symbols rather than by words."
Hardin removed a few sheets of paper from the pad under his arm and spread them out. "I
didn't do this myself, by the way," he said. "Muller Hoik of the Division of Logic has his name
signed to the analyses, as you can see."
Pirenne leaned over the table to get a better view and Hardin continued: "The message from
Anacreon was a simple problem, naturally, for the men who wrote it were men of action rather
than men of words. It boils down easily and straightforwardly to the unqualified statement, when
in symbols is what you see, and which in words, roughly translated, is, 'You give us what we
want in a week, or we take it by force.'"
There was silence as the five members of the Board ran down the line of symbols, and then
Pirenne sat down and coughed uneasily.
Hardin said, "No loophole, is there, Dr. Pirenne?"
"Doesn't seem to be."
"All right." Hardin replaced the sheets. "Before you now you see a copy of the treaty between
the Empire and Anacreon - a treaty, incidentally, which is signed on the Emperor's behalf by
the same Lord Dorwin who was here last week - and with it a symbolic analysis."
The treaty ran through five pages of fine print and the analysis was scrawled out in just under
half a page.
"As you see, gentlemen, something like ninety percent of the treaty boiled right out of the
analysis as being meaningless, and what we end up with can be described in the following
interesting manner:
"Obligations of Anacreon to the Empire: None!
Powers of the Empire over Anacreon: None!"
Again the five followed the reasoning anxiously, checking carefully back to the treaty, and when
they were finished, Pirenne said in a worried fashion, "That seems to be correct."
"You admit, then, that the treaty is nothing but a declaration of total independence on the part of
Anacreon and a recognition of that status by the Empire?"
"It seems so."
"And do you suppose that Anacreon doesn't realize that, and is not anxious to emphasize the
position of independence - so that it would naturally tend to resent any appearance of threats
from the Empire? Particularly when it is evident that the Empire is powerless to fulfill any such
threats, or it would never have allowed independence."
"But then," interposed Sutt, "how would Mayor Hardin account for Lord Dorwin's assurances of
Empire support? They seemed He shrugged. "Well, they seemed satisfactory."
Hardin threw himself back in the chair. "You know, that's the most interesting part of the whole
business. I'll admit I had thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him
- but it turned out that he was actually an accomplished diplomat and a most clever man. I took
the liberty of recording all his statements."
There was a flurry, and Pirenne opened his mouth in horror.
"What of it?" demanded Hardin. "I realize it was a gross breach of hospitality and a thing no
so-called gentleman would do. Also, that if his lordship had caught on, things might have been
unpleasant; but he didn't, and I have the record, and that's that. I took that record, had it copied
out and sent that to Hoik for analysis, also."
Lundin Crast said, "And where is the analysis?"
"That," replied Hardin, "is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three
by all odds. When Hoik, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless
statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications - in short, all the goo and dribble - he
found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out."
"Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so
you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire."
Hardin might have placed an actively working stench bomb on the table and created no more
confusion than existed after his last statement. He waited, with weary patience, for it to die
down.
"So," he concluded, "when you sent threats - and that's what they were - concerning Empire
action to Anacreon, you merely irritated a monarch who knew better. Naturally, his ego would
demand immediate action, and the ultimatum is the result-which brings me to my original
statement. We have one week left and what do we do now?"
"It seems," said Sutt, "that we have no choice but to allow Anacreon to establish military bases
on Terminus.
"I agree with you there," replied Hardin, "but what do we do toward kicking them off again at the
first opportunity?"
Yate Fulham's mustache twitched. "That sounds as if you have made up your mind that
violence must be used against them."
"Violence," came the retort, "is the last refuge of the incompetent. But I certainly don't intend to
lay down the welcome mat and brush off the best furniture for their use."
"I still don't like the way you put that," insisted Fulham. "It is a dangerous attitude; the more
dangerous because we have noticed lately that a sizable section of the populace seems to
respond to all your suggestions just so. I might as well tell you, Mayor Hardin, that the board is
not quite blind to your recent activities."
He paused and there was general agreement. Hardin shrugged.
Fulham went on: "If you were to inflame the City into an act of violence, you would achieve
elaborate suicide - and we don't intend to allow that. Our policy has but one cardinal principle,
and that is the Encyclopedia. Whatever we decide to do or not to do will be so decided because
it will be the measure required to keep that Encyclopedia safe."
"Then," said Hardin, "you come to the conclusion that we must continue our intensive campaign
of doing nothing."
Pirenne said bitterly: "You have yourself demonstrated that the Empire cannot help us; though
how and why it can be so, I don't understand. If compromise is necessary-"
Hardin had the nightmarelike sensation of running at top speed and getting nowhere. "There is
no compromise! Don't you realize that this bosh about military bases is a particularly inferior
grade of drivel? Haut Rodric told us what Anacreon was after - outright annexation and
imposition of its own feudal system of landed estates and peasant-aristocracy economy upon
us. What is left of our bluff of nuclear power may force them to move slowly, but they will move
nonetheless."
He had risen indignantly, and the rest rose with him except for Jord Fara.
And then Jord Fara spoke. "Everyone will please sit down. We've gone quite far enough, I
think. Come, there's no use looking so furious, Mayor Hardin; none of us have been committing
treason."
"You'll have to convince me of that!"
Fara smiled gently. "You know you don't mean that. Let me speak!"
His little shrewd eyes were half closed, and the perspiration gleamed on the smooth expanse of
his chin. "There seems no point in concealing that the Board has come to the decision that the
real solution to the Anacreonian problem lies in what is to be revealed to us when the Vault
opens six days from now.
"Is that your contribution to the matter?"
"Yes."
"We are to do nothing, is that fight, except to wait in quiet serenity and utter faith for the deus ex
machina to pop out of the Vault?"
"Stripped of your emotional phraseology, that's the idea."
"Such unsubtle escapism! Really, Dr. Fara, such folly smacks of genius. A lesser mind would
be incapable of it."
Fara smiled indulgently. "Your taste in epigrams is amusing, Hardin, but out of place. As a
matter of fact, I think you remember my line of argument concerning the Vault about three
weeks ago."
"Yes, I remember it. I don't deny that it was anything but a stupid idea from the standpoint of
deductive logic alone. You said - stop me when I make a mistake - that Hari Seldon was the
greatest psychologist in the System; that, hence, he could foresee the right and uncomfortable
spot we're in now; that, hence, he established the Vault as a method of telling us the way out."
"You've got the essence of the idea."
"Would it surprise you to hear that I've given considerable thought to the matter these last
weeks?"
"Very flattering. With what result?"
"With the result that pure deduction is found wanting. Again what is needed is a little sprinkling
of common sense."
"For instance?"
"For instance, if he foresaw the Anacreonian mess, why not have placed us on some other
planet nearer the Galactic centers? It's well known that Seldon maneuvered the Commissioners
on Trantor into ordering the Foundation established on Terminus. But why should he have done
so? Why put us out here at all if he could see in advance the break in communication lines, our
isolation from the Galaxy, the threat of our neighbors - and our helplessness because of the
lack of metals on Terminus? That above all! Or if he foresaw all this, why not have warned the
original settlers in advance that they might have had time to prepare, rather than wait, as he is
doing, until one foot is over the cliff, before doing so?
"And don't forget this. Even though he could foresee the problem then, we can see it equally
well now. Therefore, if he could foresee the solution then, we should be able to see it now. After
all, Seldon was not a magician. There are no trick methods of escaping from a dilemma that he
can see and we can't."
But, Hardin," reminded Fara, "we can't!
"But you haven't tried. You haven't tried once. First, you refused to admit that there was a
menace at all! Then you reposed an absolutely blind faith in the Emperor! Now you've shifted it
to Hari Seldon. Throughout you have invariably relied on authority or on the past - never on
yourselves."
His fists balled spasmodically. "It amounts to a diseased attitude - a conditioned reflex that
shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority.
There seems no doubt ever in your minds that the Emperor is more powerful than you are, or
Hari Seldon wiser. And that's wrong, don't you see?"
For some reason, no one cared to answer him.
Hardin continued: "It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of
scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the
books on the subject - written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to
solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and
made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that?"
Again the note of near-pleading in his voice. Again no answer.
He went on: "And you men and half of Terminus as well are just as bad. We sit here,
considering the Encyclopedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science, is the
classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're
receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the Periphery they've lost nuclear power. In
Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the
Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To
train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power."
And for the third time: "Don't you see? It's Galaxywide. It's a worship of the past. It's a
deterioration - a stagnation!"
He stared from one to the other and they gazed fixedly at him.
Fara was the first to recover. "Well, mystical philosophy isn't going to help us here. Let us be
concrete. Do you deny that Hari Seldon could easily have worked out historical trends of the
future by simple psychological technique?"
"No, of course not," cried Hardin. "But we can't rely on him for a solution. At best, he might
indicate the problem, but if ever there is to be a solution, we must work it out ourselves. He
can't do it for us."
Fulham spoke suddenly. "What do you mean - 'indicate the problem'? We know the problem."
Hardin whirled on him. "You think you do? You think Anacreon is all Hari Seldon is likely to be
worried about. I disagree! I tell you, gentlemen, that as yet none of you has the faintest
conception of what is really going on."
"And you do?" questioned Pirenne, hostilely.
"I think so!" Hardin jumped up and pushed his chair away. His eyes were cold and hard. "If
there's one thing that's definite, it is that there's something smelly about the whole situation;
something that is bigger than anything we've talked about yet. Just ask yourself this question:
Why was it that among the original population of the Foundation not one first-class psychologist
was included, except Bor Alurin? And he carefully refrained from training his pupils in more
than the fundamentals."
A short silence and Fara said: "All right. Why?"
"Perhaps because a psychologist might have caught on to what this was all about - and too
soon to suit Hari Seldon. As it is, we've been stumbling about, getting misty glimpses of the
truth and no more. And that is what Hari Seldon wanted."
He laughed harshly. "Good day, gentlemen!"
He stalked out of the room.
6 .
Mayor Hardin chewed at the end of his cigar. It had gone out but he was past noticing that. He
hadn't slept the night before and he had a good idea that he wouldn't sleep this coming night.
His eyes showed it.
He said wearily, "And that covers it?"
"I think so." Yohan Lee put a hand to his chin. "How does it sound?"
"Not too bad. It's got to be done, you understand, with impudence. That is, there is to be no
hesitation; no time to allow them to grasp the situation. Once we are in a position to give
orders, why, give them as though you were born to do so, and they'll obey out of habit. That's
the essence of a coup."
"If the Board remains irresolute for even
"The Board? Count them out. After tomorrow, their importance as a factor in Terminus affairs
won't matter a rusty half-credit."
Lee nodded slowly. "Yet it is strange that they've done nothing to stop us so far. You say they
weren't entirely in the dark."
"Fara stumbles at the edges of the problem. Sometimes he makes me nervous. And Pirenne's
been suspicious of me since I was elected. But, you see, they never had the capacity of really
understanding what was up. Their whole training has been authoritarian. They are sure that the
Emperor, just because he is the Emperor, is all-powerful. And they are sure that the Board of
Trustees, simply because it is the Board of Trustees acting in the name of the Emperor, cannot
be in a position where it does not give the orders. That incapacity to recognize the possibility of
revolt is our best ally."
He heaved out of his chair and went to the water cooler. "They're not bad fellows, Lee, when
they stick to their Encyclopedia - and we'll see that that's where they stick in the future. They're
hopelessly incompetent when it comes to ruling Terminus. Go away now and start things
rolling. I want to be alone."
He sat down on the comer of his desk and stared at the cup of water.
Space! If only he were as confident as he pretended! The Anacreonians were landing in two
days and what had he to go on but a set of notions and half-guesses as to what Had Seldon
had been driving at these past fifty years? He wasn't even a real, honest-to-goodness
psychologist - just a tumbler with a little training trying to outguess the greatest mind of the
age.
If Fara were fight; if Anacreon were all the problem Hari Seldon had foreseen; if the
Encyclopedia were all he was interested in preserving - then what price coup d'etat?
He shrugged and drank his water.
7 .
The Vault was furnished with considerably more than six chairs, as though a larger company
had been expected. Hardin noted that thoughtfully and seated himself wearily in a comer just
as far from the other five as possible.
The Board members did not seem to object to that arrangement. They spoke among
themselves in whispers, which fell off into sibilant monosyllables, and then into nothing at all. Of
them all, only Jord Fara seemed even reasonably calm. He had produced a watch and was
staring at it somberly.
Hardin glanced at his own watch and then at the glass cubicle - absolutely empty - that
dominated half the room. It was the only unusual feature of the room, for aside from that there
was no indication that somewhere a computer was splitting off instants of time toward that
precise moment when a muon stream would flow, a connection be made and-
The lights went dim!
They didn't go out, but merely yellowed and sank with a suddenness that made Hardin jump.
He had lifted his eyes to the ceiling lights in startled fashion, and when he brought them down
the glass cubicle was no longer empty.
A figure occupied it , a figure in a wheel chair!
It said nothing for a few moments, but it closed the book upon its lap and fingered it idly. And
then it smiled, and the face seemed all alive.
It said, "I am Hari Seldon." The voice was old and soft.
Hardin almost rose to acknowledge the introduction and stopped himself in the act.
The voice continued conversationally: "As you see, I am confined to this chair and cannot rise
to greet you. Your grandparents left for Terminus a few months back in my time and since then
I have suffered a rather inconvenient paralysis. I can't see you, you know, so I can't greet you
properly. I don't even know how many of you there are, so all this must be conducted
informally. If any of you are standing, please sit down; and if you care to smoke, I wouldn't
mind." There was a light chuckle. "Why should I? I'm not really here."
Hardin fumbled for a cigar almost automatically, but thought better of it.
Hari Seldon put away his book - as if laying it upon a desk at his side - and when his fingers let
go, it disappeared.
He said: "It is fifty years now since this Foundation was established - fifty years in which the
members of the Foundation have been ignorant of what it was they were working toward. It was
necessary that they be ignorant, but now the necessity is gone.
"The Encyclopedia Foundation, to begin with, is a fraud, and always has been!"
There was a sound of a scramble behind Hardin and one or two muffled exclamations, but he
did not turn around.
Hari Seldon was, of course, undisturbed. He went on: "It is a fraud in the sense that neither I
nor my colleagues care at all whether a single volume of the Encyclopedia is ever published. It
has served its purpose, since by it we extracted an imperial charter from the Emperor, by it we
attracted the hundred thousand humans necessary for our scheme, and by it we managed to
keep them preoccupied while events shaped themselves, until it was too late for any of them to
draw back.
"In the fifty years that you have worked on this fraudulent project - there is no use in softening
phrases - your retreat has been cut off, and you have now no choice but to proceed on the
infinitely more important project that was, and is, our real plan.
"To that end we have placed you on such a planet and at such a time that in fifty years you
were maneuvered to the point where you no longer have freedom of action. From now on, and
into the centuries, the path you must take is inevitable. You will be faced with a series of crises,
as you are now faced with the first, and in each case your freedom of action will become
similarly circumscribed so that you will be forced along one, and only one, path.
"It is that path which our psychology has worked out - and for a reason.
"For centuries Galactic civilization has stagnated and declined, though only a few ever realized
that. But now, at last, the Periphery is breaking away and the political unity of the Empire is
shattered. Somewhere in the fifty years just past is where the historians of the future will place
an arbitrary line and say: 'This marks the Fall of the Galactic Empire.'
"And they will be right, though scarcely any will recognize that Fall for additional centuries.
"And after the Fall will come inevitable barbarism, a period which, our psychohistory tells us,
should, under ordinary circumstances, last for thirty thousand years. We cannot stop the Fall.
We do not wish to; for Imperial culture has lost whatever virility and worth it once had. But we
can shorten the period of Barbarism that must follow - down to a single thousand of years.
"The ins and outs of that shortening, we cannot tell you; just as we could not tell you the truth
about the Foundation fifty years ago. Were you to discover those ins and outs, our plan might
fail; as it would have, had you penetrated the fraud of the Encyclopedia earlier; for then, by
knowledge, your freedom of action would be expanded and the number of additional variables
introduced would become greater than our psychology could handle.
"But you won't, for there are no psychologists on Terminus, and never were, but for Alurin -
and he was one of us.
"But this I can tell you: Terminus and its companion Foundation at the other end of the Galaxy
are the seeds of the Renascence and the future founders of the Second Galactic Empire. And it
is the present crisis that is starting Terminus off to that climax.
"This, by the way, is a rather straightforward crisis, much simpler than many of those that are
ahead. To reduce it to its fundamentals, it is this: You are a planet suddenly cut off from the
still-civilized centers of the Galaxy, and threatened by your stronger neighbors. You are a small
world of scientists surrounded by vast and rapidly expanding reaches of barbarism. You are an
island of nuclear power in a growing ocean of more primitive energy; but are helpless despite
that, because of your lack of metals.
"You see, then, that you are faced by hard necessity, and that action is forced on you. The
nature of that action - that is, the solution to your dilemma - is, of course, obvious!"
The image of Hari Seldon reached into open air and the book once more appeared in his hand.
Fie opened it and said:
"But whatever devious course your future history may take, impress it always upon your
descendants that the path has been marked out, and that at its end is new and greater Empire!"
And as his eyes bent to his book, he flicked into nothingness, and the lights brightened once
more.
Hardin looked up to see Pirenne facing him, eyes tragic and lips trembling.
The chairman's voice was firm but toneless. "You were right, it seems. If you will see us tonight
at six, the Board will consult with you as to the next move."
They shook his hand, each one, and left, and Hardin smiled to himself. They were
fundamentally sound at that; for they were scientists enough to admit that they were wrong -
but for them, it was too late.
Fie looked at his watch. By this time, it was all over. Lee's men were in control and the Board
was giving orders no longer.
The Anacreonians were landing their first spaceships tomorrow, but that was all right, too. In six
months, they would be giving orders no longer.
In fact, as Hari Seldon had said, and as Salvor Hardin had guessed since the day that Anselm
haut Rodric had first revealed to him Anacreon's lack of nuclear power - the solution to this first
crisis was obvious.
Obvious as all hell!
PART III
THE MAYORS
i.
THE FOUR KINGDOMS - The name given to those portions of the Province of Anacreon which
broke away from the First Empire in the early years of the Foundational Era to form
independent and short-lived kingdoms. The largest and most powerful of these was Anacreon
itself which in area...
... Undoubtedly the most interesting aspect of the history of the Four Kingdoms involves the
strange society forced temporarily upon it during the administration of Salvor Hardin....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
A deputation!
That Salvor Hardin had seen it coming made it none the more pleasant. On the contrary, he
found anticipation distinctly annoying.
Yohan Lee advocated extreme measures. "I don't see, Hardin," he said, "that we need waste
any time. They can't do anything till next election - legally, anyway - and that gives us a year.
Give them the brush-off."
Hardin pursed his lips. "Lee, you'll never learn. In the forty years I've known you, you've never
once learned the gentle art of sneaking up from behind."
"It's not my way of fighting," grumbled Lee.
"Yes, I know that. I suppose that's why you're the one man I trust." He paused and reached for
a cigar. "We've come a long way, Lee, since we engineered our coup against the
Encyclopedists way back. I'm getting old. Sixty-two. Do you ever think how fast those thirty
years went?"
Lee snorted. "I don't feel old, and I'm sixty-six."
"Yes, but I haven't your digestion." Hardin sucked lazily at his cigar. He had long since stopped
wishing for the mild Vegan tobacco of his youth. Those days when the planet, Terminus, had
trafficked with every part of the Galactic Empire belonged in the limbo to which all Good Old
Days go. Toward the same limbo where the Galactic Empire was heading. He wondered who
the new emperor was - or if there was a new emperor at all - or any Empire. Space! For thirty
years now, since the breakup of communications here at the edge of the Galaxy, the whole
universe of Terminus had consisted of itself and the four surrounding kingdoms.
How the mighty had fallen! Kingdoms ! They were prefects in the old days, all part of the same
province, which in turn had been part of a sector, which in turn had been part of a quadrant,
which in turn had been part of the allembracing Galactic Empire. And now that the Empire had
lost control over the farther reaches of the Galaxy, these little splinter groups of planets became
kingdoms - with comic-opera kings and nobles, and petty, meaningless wars, and a life that
went on pathetically among the ruins.
A civilization falling. Nuclear power forgotten. Science fading to mythology - until the
Foundation had stepped in. The Foundation that Hari Seldon had established for just that
purpose here on Terminus.
Lee was at the window and his voice broke in on Hardin's reverie. "They've come," he said, "in
a late-model ground car, the young pups." He took a few uncertain steps toward the door and
then looked at Hardin.
Hardin smiled, and waved him back. "I've given orders to have them brought up here."
"Here! What for? You're making them too important."
"Why go through all the ceremonies of an official mayor's audience? I'm getting too old for red
tape. Besides which, flattery is useful when dealing with youngsters - particularly when it
doesn't commit you to anything." He winked. "Sit down, Lee, and give me your moral backing.
I'll need it with this young Sermak."
"That fellow, Sermak," said Lee, heavily, "is dangerous. He's got a following, Hardin, so don't
underestimate him."
"Have I ever underestimated anybody?"
"Well, then, arrest him. You can accuse him of something or other afterward."
Hardin ignored that last bit of advice. "There they are, Lee." In response to the signal, he
stepped on the pedal beneath his desk, and the door slid aside.
They filed in, the four that composed the deputation, and Hardin waved them gently to the
armchairs that faced his desk in a semicircle. They bowed and waited for the mayor to speak
first.
Hardin flicked open the curiously carved silver lid of the cigar box that had once belonged to
Jord Fara of the old Board of Trustees in the long-dead days of the Encyclopedists. It was a
genuine Empire product from Santanni, though the cigars it now contained were home-grown.
One by one, with grave solemnity, the four of the deputation accepted cigars and lit up in
ritualistic fashion.
Sef Sermak was second from the right, the youngest of the young group - and the most
interesting with his bristly yellow mustache trimmed precisely, and his sunken eyes of uncertain
color. The other three Hardin dismissed almost immediately; they were rank and file on the face
of them. It was on Sermak that he concentrated, the Sermak who had already, in his first term
in the City Council, turned that sedate body topsy-turvy more than once, and it was to Sermak
that he said:
"I've been particularly anxious to see you, Councilman, ever since your very excellent speech
last month. Your attack on the foreign policy of this government was a most capable one."
Sermak's eyes smoldered. "Your interest honors me. The attack may or may not have been
capable, but it was certainly justified."
"Perhaps! Your opinions are yours, of course. Still you are rather young."
Dryly. "It is a fault that most people are guilty of at some period of their life. You became mayor
of the city when you were two years younger than I am now."
Hardin smiled to himself. The yearling was a cool customer. He said, "I take it now that you
have come to see me concerning this same foreign policy that annoys you so greatly in the
Council Chamber. Are you speaking for your three colleagues, or must I listen to each of you
separately?" There were quick mutual glances among the four young men, a slight flickering of
eyelids.
Sermak said grimly, "I speak for the people of Terminus - a people who are not now truly
represented in the rubberstamp body they call the Council."
"I see. Go ahead, then!"
"It comes to this, Mr. Mayor. We are dissatisfied-"
"By 'we' you mean 'the people,' don't you?"
Sermak stared hostilely, sensing a trap, and replied coldly, "I believe that my views reflect those
of the majority of the voters of Terminus. Does that suit you?"
"Well, a statement like that is all the better for proof, but go on, anyway. You are dissatisfied."
"Yes, dissatisfied with the policy which for thirty years had been stripping Terminus defenseless
against the inevitable attack from outside."
"I see. And therefore? Go on, go on."
"It's nice of you to anticipate. And therefore we are forming a new political party; one that will
stand for the immediate needs of Terminus and not for a mystic 'manifest destiny' of future
Empire. We are going to throw you and your lick-spittle clique of appeasers out of City Hall-and
that soon."
"Unless? There's always an 'unless,' you know."
"Not much of one in this case: Unless you resign now. I'm not asking you to change your
policies - I wouldn't trust you that far. Your promises are worth nothing. An outright resignation
is all we'll take."
"I see." Hardin crossed his legs and teetered his chair back on two legs. "That's your ultimatum.
Nice of you to give me warning. But, you see, I rather think I'll ignore it."
"Don't think it was a warning, Mr. Mayor. It was an announcement of principles and of action.
The new party has already been formed, and it will begin its official activities tomorrow. There is
neither room nor desire for compromise, and, frankly, it was only our recognition of your
services to the City that induced us to offer the easy way out. I didn't think you'd take it, but my
conscience is clear.
The next election will be a more forcible and quite irresistible reminder that resignation is
necessary."
He rose and motioned the rest up.
Hardin lifted his arm. "Hold on! Sit down!"
Sef Sermak seated himself once more with just a shade too much alacrity and Hardin smiled
behind a straight face. In spite of his words, he was waiting for an offer.
Hardin said, "In exactly what way do you want our foreign policy changed? Do you want us to
attack the Four Kingdoms, now, at once, and all four simultaneously?"
"I make no such suggestion, Mr. Mayor. It is our simple proposition that all appeasement cease
immediately. Throughout your administration, you have carried out a policy of scientific aid to
the Kingdoms. You have given them nuclear power. You have helped rebuild power plants on
their territories. You have established medical clinics, chemical laboratories and factories."
"Well? And your objection?"
"You have done this in order to keep them from attacking us. With these as bribes, you have
been playing the fool in a colossal game of blackmail, in which you have allowed Terminus to
be sucked dry - with the result that now we are at the mercy of these barbarians."
"In what way?"
"Because you have given them power, given them weapons, actually serviced the ships of their
navies, they are infinitely stronger than they were three decades ago. Their demands are
increasing, and with their new weapons, they will eventually satisfy all their demands at once by
violent annexation of Terminus. Isn't that the way blackmail usually ends?"
"And your remedy?"
"Stop the bribes immediately and while you can. Spend your effort in strengthening Terminus
itself - and attack first!"
Hardin watched the young fellow's little blond mustache with an almost morbid interest. Sermak
felt sure of himself or he wouldn't talk so much. There was no doubt that his remarks were the
reflection of a pretty huge segment of the population, pretty huge.
His voice did not betray the slightly perturbed current of his thoughts. If was almost negligent.
"Are you finished?"
"For the moment."
"Well, then, do you notice the framed statement I have on the wall behind me? Read it, if you
will!
Sermak's lips twitched. "It says: 'Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.' That's an old
man's doctrine, Mr. Mayor."
"I applied it as a young man, Mr. Councilman - and successfully. You were busily being born
when it happened, but perhaps you may have read something of it in school."
He eyed Sermak closely and continued in measured tones, "When Hari Seldon established the
Foundation here, it was for the ostensible purpose of producing a great Encyclopedia, and for
fifty years we followed that will-of-the-wisp, before discovering what he was really after. By that
time, it was almost too late. When communications with the central regions of the old Empire
broke down, we found ourselves a world of scientists concentrated in a single city, possessing
no industries, and surrounded by newly created kingdoms, hostile and largely barbarous. We
were a tiny island of nuclear power in this ocean of barbarism, and an infinitely valuable prize.
"Anacreon, then as now, the most powerful of the Four Kingdoms, demanded and later actually
established a military base upon Terminus, and the then rulers of the City, the Encyclopedists,
knew very well that this was only a preliminary to taking over the entire planet. That is how
matters stood when I ... uh ... assumed actual government. What would you have done?"
Sermak shrugged his shoulders. "That's an academic question. Of course, I know what you
did."
"I'll repeat it, anyway. Perhaps you don't get the point. The temptation was great to muster what
force we could and put up a fight. It's the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to
self-respect - but, nearly invariably, the stupidest. You would have done it; you and your talk of
'attack first.' What I did, instead, was to visit the three other kingdoms, one by one; point out to
each that to allow the secret of nuclear power to fall into the hands of Anacreon was the
quickest way of cutting their own throats; and suggest gently that they do the obvious thing.
That was all. One month after the Anacreonian force had landed on Terminus, their king
received a joint ultimatum from his three neighbors. In seven days, the last Anacreonian was off
Terminus.
Now tell me, where was the need for violence?"
The young councilman regarded his cigar stub thoughtfully and tossed it into the incinerator
chute. "I fail to see the analogy. Insulin will bring a diabetic to normal without the faintest need
of a knife, but appendicitis needs an operation. You can't help that. When other courses have
failed, what is left but, as you put it, the last refuge? It's your fault that we're driven to it."
"I? Oh, yes, again my policy of appeasement. You still seem to lack grasp of the fundamental
necessities of our position. Our problem wasn't over with the departure of the Anacreonians.
They had just begun. The Four Kingdoms were more our enemies than ever, for each wanted
nuclear power-and each was kept off our throats only for fear of the other three. We are
balanced on the point of a very sharp sword, and the slightest sway in any direction - If, for
instance, one kingdom becomes too strong; or if two form a coalition - You understand?"
"Certainly. That was the time to begin all-out preparations for war."
"On the contrary. That was the time to begin all-out prevention of war. I played them one
against the other. I helped each in turn. I offered them science, trade, education, scientific
medicine. I made Terminus of more value to them as a flourishing world than as a military prize.
It worked for thirty years."
"Yes, but you were forced to surround these scientific gifts with the most outrageous mummery.
You've made half religion, half balderdash out of it. You've erected a hierarchy of priests and
complicated, meaningless ritual."
Hardin frowned. "What of that? I don't see that it has anything to do with the argument at all. I
started that way at first because the barbarians looked upon our science as a sort of magical
sorcery, and it was easiest to get them to accept it on that basis. The priesthood built itself and
if we help it along we are only following the line of least resistance. It is a minor matter."
"But these priests are in charge of the power plants. That is not a minor matter."
"True, but we have trained them. Their knowledge of their tools is purely empirical; and they
have a firm belief in the mummery that surrounds them."
"And if one pierces through the mummery, and has the genius to brush aside empiricism, what
is to prevent him from learning actual techniques, and selling out to the most satisfactory
bidder? What price our value to the kingdoms, then?"
"Little chance of that, Sermak. You are being superficial. The best men on the planets of the
kingdoms are sent here to the Foundation each year and educated into the priesthood. And the
best of these remain here as research students. If you think that those who are left, with
practically no knowledge of the elements of science, or worse, still, with the distorted
knowledge the priests receive, can penetrate at a bound to nuclear power, to electronics, to the
theory of the hyperwarp - you have a very romantic and very foolish idea of science. It takes
lifetimes of training and an excellent brain to get that far."
Yohan Lee had risen abruptly during the foregoing speech and left the room. He had returned
now and when Hardin finished speaking, he bent to his superior's ear. A whisper was
exchanged and then a leaden cylinder. Then, with one short hostile look at the deputation, Lee
resumed his chair.
Hardin turned the cylinder end for end in his hands, watching the deputation through his lashes.
And then he opened it with a hard, sudden twist and only Sermak had the sense not to throw a
rapid look at the rolled paper that fell out.
"In short, gentlemen," he said, "the Government is of the opinion that it knows what it is doing."
He read as he spoke. There were the lines of intricate, meaningless code that covered the
page and the three penciled words scrawled in one comer that carried the message. He took it
in at a glance and tossed it casually into the incinerator shaft.
"That," Hardin then said, "ends the interview, I'm afraid. Glad to have met you all. Thank you for
coming." He shook hands with each in perfunctory fashion, and they filed out.
Hardin had almost gotten out of the habit of laughing, but after Sermak and his three silent
partners were well out of earshot, he indulged in a dry chuckle and bent an amused look on
Lee.
"How did you like that battle of bluffs, Lee?"
Lee snorted grumpily. "I'm not sure that he was bluffing. Treat him with kid gloves and he's
quite liable to win the next election, just as he says."
"Oh, quite likely, quite likely - if nothing happens first."
"Make sure they don't happen in the wrong direction this time, Hardin. I tell you this Sermak has
a following. What if he doesn't wait till the next election? There was a time when you and I put
things through violently, in spite of your slogan about what violence is."
Hardin cocked an eyebrow. "You are pessimistic today, Lee. And singularly contrary, too, or
you wouldn't speak of violence. Our own little putsch was carried through without loss of life,
you remember. It was a necessary measure put through at the proper moment, and went over
smoothly, painlessly, and all but effortlessly. As for Sermak, he's up against a different
proposition. You and I, Lee, aren't the Encyclopedists. We stand prepared. Order your men
onto these youngsters in a nice way, old fellow. Don't let them know they're being watched -
but eyes open, you understand."
Lee laughed in sour amusement. "I'd be a fine one to wait for your orders, wouldn't I, Hardin?
Sermak and his men have been under surveillance for a month now."
The mayor chuckled. "Got in first, did you? All right. By the way," he observed, and added
softly, "Ambassador Verisof is returning to Terminus. Temporarily, I hope."
There was a short silence, faintly horrified, and then Lee said, "Was that the message? Are
things breaking already?"
"Don't know. I can't tell till I hear what Verisof has to say. They may be, though. After all, they
have to before election. But what are you looking so dead about?"
"Because I don't know how it's going to turn out. You're too deep, Hardin, and you're playing
the game too close to your chest."
"Even you?" murmured Hardin. And aloud, "Does that mean you're going to join Sermak's new
party?"
Lee smiled against his will. "All right. You win. How about lunch now?"
2 .
There are many epigrams attributed to Hardin - a confirmed epigrammatist - a good many of
which are probably apocryphal. Nevertheless, it is reported that on a certain occasion, he said:
"It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety."
Poly Verisof had had occasion to act on that advice more than once for he was now in the
fourteenth year of his double status on Anacreon - a double status the upkeep of which
reminded him often and unpleasantly of a dance performed barefoot on hot metal.
To the people of Anacreon he was high priest, representative of that Foundation which, to
those "barbarians," was the acme of mystery and the physical center of this religion they had
created - with Hardin's help - in the last three decades. As such, he received a homage that
had become horribly wearying, for from his soul he despised the ritual of which he was the
center.
But to the King of Anacreon - the old one that had been, and the young grandson that was now
on the throne - he was simply the ambassador of a power at once feared and coveted.
On the whole, it was an uncomfortable job, and his first trip to the Foundation in three years,
despite the disturbing incident that had made it necessary, was something in the nature of a
holiday.
And since it was not the first time he had had to travel in absolute secrecy, he again made use
of Hardin's epigram on the uses of the obvious.
He changed into his civilian clothes - a holiday in itself - and boarded a passenger liner to the
Foundation, second class. Once at Terminus, he threaded his way through the crowd at the
spaceport and called up City Hall at a public visiphone.
He said, "My name is Jan Smite. I have an appointment with the mayor this afternoon."
The dead-voiced but efficient young lady at the other end made a second connection and
exchanged a few rapid words, then said to Verisof in dry, mechanical tone, "Mayor Hardin will
see you in half an hour, sir," and the screen went blank.
Whereupon the ambassador to Anacreon bought the latest edition of the Terminus City Journal,
sauntered casually to City Hall Park and, sitting, down on the first empty bench he came to,
read the editorial page, sport section and comic sheet while waiting. At the end of half an hour,
he tucked the paper under his arm, entered City Hall and presented himself in the anteroom.
In doing all this he remained safely and thoroughly unrecognized, for since he was so entirely
obvious, no one gave him a second look.
Hardin looked up at him and grinned. "Have a cigar! How was the trip?"
Verisof helped himself. "Interesting. There was a priest in the next cabin on his way here to
take a special course in the preparation of radioactive synthetics - for the treatment of cancer,
you know
"Surely, he didn't call it radioactive synthetics, now?"
"I guess not! It was the Holy Food to him."
The mayor smiled. "Go on."
"He inveigled me into a theological discussion and did his level best to elevate me out of sordid
materialism."
"And never recognized his own high priest?"
"Without my crimson robe? Besides, he was a Smyrnian. It was an interesting experience,
though. It is remarkable, Hardin, how the religion of science has grabbed hold. I've written an
essay on the subject - entirely for my own amusement; it wouldn't do to have it published.
Treating the problem sociologically, it would seem that when the old Empire began to rot at the
fringes, it could be considered that science, as science, had failed the outer worlds. To be
reaccepted it would have to present itself in another guise and it has done just that. It works out
beautifully."
"Interesting!" The mayor placed his arms around his neck and said suddenly, "Start talking
about the situation at Anacreon!"
The ambassador frowned and withdrew the cigar from his mouth. He looked at it distastefully
and put it down. "Well, it's pretty bad."
"You wouldn't be here, otherwise."
"Scarcely. Here's the position. The key man at Anacreon is the Prince Regent, Wienis. He's
King Lepold's uncle."
"I know. But Lepold is coming of age next year, isn't he? I believe he'll be sixteen in February."
"Yes." Pause, and then a wry addition. "If he lives. The king's father died under suspicious
circumstances. A needle bullet through the chest during a hunt. It was called an accident."
"Hmph. I seem to remember Wienis the time I was on Anacreon, when we kicked them off
Terminus. It was before your time. Let's see now. If I remember, he was a dark young fellow,
black hair and a squint in his right eye. He had a funny hook in his nose."
"Same fellow. The hook and the squint are still there, but his hair's gray now. He plays the
game dirty. Luckily, he's the most egregious fool on the planet. Fancies himself as a shrewd
devil, too, which mades his folly the more transparent."
"That's usually the way."
"His notion of cracking an egg is to shoot a nuclear blast at it. Witness the tax on Temple
property he tried to impose just after the old king died two years ago. Remember?"
Hardin nodded thoughtfully, then smiled. "The priests raised a howl."
"They raised one you could hear way out to Lucreza. He's shown more caution in dealing with
the priesthood since, but he still manages to do things the hard way. In a way, it's unfortunate
for us; he has unlimited self-confidence."
"Probably an over-compensated inferiority complex. Younger sons of royalty get that way, you
know."
But it amounts to the same thing. He's foaming at the mouth with eagerness to attack the
Foundation. He scarcely troubles to conceal it. And he's in a position to do it, too, from the
standpoint of armament. The old king built up a magnificent navy, and Wienis hasn't been
sleeping the last two years. In fact, the tax on Temple property was originally intended for
further armament, and when that fell through he increased the income tax twice."
"Any grumbling at that?"
"None of serious importance. Obedience to appointed authority was the text of every sermon in
the kingdom for weeks. Not that Wienis showed any gratitude."
"All right. I've got the background. Now what's happened?"
"Two weeks ago an Anacreonian merchant ship came across a derelict battle cruiser of the old
Imperial Navy. It must have been drifting in space for at least three centuries."
Interest flickered in Hardin's eyes. He sat up. "Yes, I've heard of that. The Board of Navigation
has sent me a petition asking me to obtain the ship for purposes of study. It is in good
condition, I understand."
"In entirely too good condition," responded Verisof, dryly. "When Wienis received your
suggestion last week that he turn the ship over to the Foundation, he almost had convulsions."
"He hasn't answered yet."
"He won't - except with guns, or so he thinks. You see, he came to me on the day I left
Anacreon and requested that the Foundation put this battle cruiser into fighting order and turn it
over to the Anacreonian navy. He had the infernal gall to say that your note of last week
indicated a plan of the Foundation's to attack Anacreon. He said that refusal to repair the battle
cruiser would confirm his suspicions; and indicated that measures for the self-defense of
Anacreon would be forced upon him. Those are his words. Forced upon him! And that's why I'm
here."
Hardin laughed gently.
Verisof smiled and continued, "Of course, he expects a refusal, and it would be a perfect
excuse - in his eyes - for immediate attack."
"I see that, Verisof. Well, we have at least six months to spare, so have the ship fixed up and
present it with my compliments. Have it renamed the Wienis as a mark of our esteem and
affection."
He laughed again.
And again Verisof responded with the faintest trace of a smile, "I suppose it's the logical step,
Hardin - but I'm worried."
"What about?"
"It's a ship! They could build in those days. Its cubic capacity is half again that of the entire
Anacreonian navy. It's got nuclear blasts capable of blowing up a planet, and a shield that could
take a Q-beam without working up radiation. Too much of a good thing, Hardin
"Superficial, Verisof, superficial. You and I both know that the armament he now has could
defeat Terminus handily, long before we could repair the cruiser for our own use. What does it
matter, then, if we give him the cruiser as well? You know it won't ever come to actual war."
"I suppose so. Yes." The ambassador looked up. "But Hardin
"Well? Why do you stop? Go ahead."
"Look. This isn't my province. But I've been reading the paper." He placed the Journal on the
desk and indicated the front page. "What's this all about?"
Hardin dropped a casual glance. "'A group of Councilmen are forming a new political party.'"
"That's what it says." Verisof fidgeted. "I know you're in better touch with internal matters than I
am, but they're attacking you with everything short of physical violence. How strong are they?"
"Damned strong. They'll probably control the Council after next election."
"Not before?" Verisof looked at the mayor obliquely. "There are ways of gaining control besides
elections."
"Do you take me for Wienis?"
"No. But repairing the ship will take months and an attack after that is certain. Our yielding will
be taken as a sign of appalling weakness and the addition of the Imperial Cruiser will just about
double the strength of Wienis' navy. He'll attack as sure as I'm a high priest. Why take
chances? Do one of two things. Either reveal the plan of campaign to the Council, or force the
issue with Anacreon now!"
Hardin frowned. "Force the issue now? Before the crisis comes? It's the one thing I mustn't do.
There's Hari Seldon and the Plan, you know."
Verisof hesitated, then muttered, "You're absolutely sure, then, that there is a Plan?"
"There can scarcely be any doubt," came the stiff reply. "I was present at the opening of the
Time Vault and Seldon's recording revealed it then."
"I didn't mean that, Hardin. I just don't see how it could be possible to chart history for a
thousand years ahead. Maybe Seldon overestimated himself." He shriveled a bit at Hardin's
ironical smile, and added, "Well, I'm no psychologist,"
"Exactly. None of us are. But I did receive some elementary training in my youth - enough to
know what psychology is capable of, even if I can't exploit its capabilities myself. There's no
doubt but that Seldon did exactly what he claims to have done. The Foundation, as he says,
was established as a scientific refuge - the means by which the science and culture of the
dying Empire was to be preserved through the centuries of barbarism that have begun, to be
rekindled in the end into a second Empire."
Verisof nodded, a trifle doubtfully. "Everyone knows that's the way things are supposed to go.
But can we afford to take chances? Can we risk the present for the sake of a nebulous future?"
"We must - because the future isn't nebulous. It's been calculated out by Seldon and charted.
Each successive crisis in our history is mapped and each depends in a measure on the
successful conclusion of the ones previous. This is only the second crisis and Space knows
what effect even a trifling deviation would have in the end."
"That's rather empty speculation."
"No! Hari Seldon said in the Time Vault, that at each crisis our freedom of action would become
circumscribed to the point where only one course of action was possible."
"So as to keep us on the straight and narrow?"
"So as to keep us from deviating, yes. But, conversely, as long as more than one course of
action is possible, the crisis has not been reached. We must let things drift so long as we
possibly can, and by space, that's what I intend doing."
Verisof didn't answer. He chewed his lower lip in a grudging silence. It had only been the year
before that Hardin had first discussed the problem with him - the real problem; the problem of
countering Anacreon's hostile preparations. And then only because he, Verisof, had balked at
further appeasement.
Hardin seemed to follow his ambassador's thoughts. "I would much rather never to have told
you anything about this."
"What makes you say that?" cried Verisof, in surprise.
"Because there are six people now - you and I, the other three ambassadors and Yohan Lee -
who have a fair notion of what's ahead; and I'm damned afraid that it was Seldon's idea to have
no one know."
"Why so?"
"Because even Seldon's advanced psychology was limited. It could not handle too many
independent variables. He couldn't work with individuals over any length of time; any more than
you could apply kinetic theory of gases to single molecules. He worked with mobs, populations
of whole planets, and only blind mobs who do not possess foreknowledge of the results of their
own actions."
"That's not plain."
"I can't help it. I'm not psychologist enough to explain it scientifically. But this you know. There
are no trained psychologists on Terminus and no mathematical texts on the science. It is plain
that he wanted no one on Terminus capable of working out the future in advance. Seldon
wanted us to proceed blindly - and therefore correctly - according to the law of mob
psychology. As I once told you, I never knew where we were heading when I first drove out the
Anacreonians. My idea had been to maintain balance of power, no more than that. It was only
afterward that I thought I saw a pattern in events; but I've done my level best not to act on that
knowledge. Interference due to foresight would have knocked the Plan out of kilter."
Verisof nodded thoughtfully. "I've heard arguments almost as complicated in the Temples back
on Anacreon. How do you expect to spot the fight moment of action?"
"It's spotted already. You admit that once we repair the battle cruiser nothing will stop Wienis
from attacking us. There will no longer be any alternative in that respect."
"Yes
"All right. That accounts for the external aspect. Meanwhile, you'll further admit that the next
election will see a new and hostile Council that will force action against Anacreon. There is no
alternative there."
"Yes."
"And as soon as all the alternatives disappear, the crisis has come. Just the same - I get
worried."
He paused, and Verisof waited. Slowly, almost reluctantly, Hardin continued, "I've got the idea
-just a notion - that the external and internal pressures were planned to come to a head
simultaneously. As it is, there's a few months difference. Wienis will probably attack before
spring, and elections are still a year off."
"That doesn't sound important."
"I don't know. It may be due merely to unavoidable errors of calculation, or it might be due to
the fact that I knew too much. I tried never to let my foresight influence my action, but how can I
tell? And what effect will the discrepancy have? Anyway," he looked up, "there's one thing I've
decided."
"And what's that?"
"When the crisis does begin to break, I'm going to Anacreon. I want to be on the spot ... Oh,
that's enough, Verisof. It's getting late. Let's go out and make a night of it. I want some
relaxation."
"Then get it right here,' said Verisof. "I don't want to be recognized, or you know what this new
party your precious Councilmen are forming would say. Call for the brandy."
And Hardin did - but not for too much.
3 .
In the ancient days when the Galactic Empire had embraced the Galaxy, and Anacreon had
been the richest of the prefects of the Periphery, more than one emperor had visited the
Viceregal Palace in state. And not one had left without at least one effort to pit his skill with air
speedster and needle gun against the feathered flying fortress they call the Nyakbird.
The fame of Anacreon had withered to nothing with the decay of the times. The Viceregal
Palace was a drafty mass of ruins except for the wing that Foundation workmen had restored.
And no Emperor had been seen in Anacreon for two hundred years.
But Nyak hunting was still the royal sport and a good eye with the needle gun still the first
requirement of Anacreon's kings.
Lepold I, King of Anacreon and - as was invariably, but untruthfully added - Lord of the Outer
Dominions, though not yet sixteen had already proved his skill many times over. He had
brought down his first Nyak when scarcely thirteen; had brought down his tenth the week after
his accession to the throne; and was returning now from his forty-sixth.
"Fifty before I come of age," he had exulted. "Who'll take the wager?"
But Courtiers don't take wagers against the king's skill. There is the deadly danger of winning.
So no one did, and the king left to change his clothes in high spirits.
"Lepold!"
The king stopped mid-step at the one voice that could cause him to do so. He turned sulkily.
Wienis stood upon the threshold of his chambers and beetled at his young nephew.
"Send them away," he motioned impatiently. "Get rid of them."
The king nodded curtly and the two chamberlains bowed and backed down the stairs. Lepold
entered his uncle's room.
Wienis stared at the king's hunting suit morosely. "You'll have more important things to tend to
than Nyak hunting soon enough."
He turned his back and stumped to his desk. Since he had grown too old for the rush of air, the
perilous dive within wing-beat of the Nyak, the roll and climb of the speedster at the motion of a
foot, he had soured upon the whole sport.
Lepold appreciated his uncle's sour-grapes attitude and it was not without malice that he began
enthusiastically, "But you should have been with us today, uncle. We flushed one in the wilds of
Sarnia that was a monster. And game as they come. We had it out for two hours over at least
seventy square miles of ground. And then I got to Sunwards - he was motioning graphically, as
though he were once more in his speedster -"and dived torque-wise. Caught him on the rise
just under the left wing at quarters. It maddened him and he canted athwart. I took his dare and
veered a-left, waiting for the plummet. Sure enough, down he came. He was within wing-beat
before I moved and then
"Lepold!"
"Well!- I got him."
"I'm sure you did. Now will you attend?"
The king shrugged and gravitated to the end table where he nibbled at a Lera nut in quite an
unregal sulk. He did not dare to meet his uncle's eyes.
Wienis said, by way of preamble, "I've been to the ship today."
"What ship?"
"There is only one ship. The ship. The one the Foundation is repairing for the navy. The old
Imperial cruiser. Do I make myself sufficiently plain?"
"That one? You see, I told you the Foundation would repair it if we asked them to. It's all
poppycock, you know, that story of yours about their wanting to attack us. Because if they did,
why would they fix the ship? It doesn't make sense, you know."
"Lepold, you're a fool!"
The king, who had just discarded the shell of the Lera nut and was lifting another to his lips,
flushed.
"Well now, look here," he said, with anger that scarcely rose above peevishness, "I don't think
you ought to call me that. You forget yourself. I'll be of age in two months, you know."
"Yes, and you're in a fine position to assume regal responsibilities. If you spent half the time on
public affairs that you do on Nyak hunting, I'd resign the regency directly with a clear
conscience."
"I don't care. That has nothing to do with the case, you know. The fact is that even if you are
the regent and my uncle, I'm still king and you're still my subject. You oughtn't to call me a fool
and you oughtn't to sit in my presence, anyway. You haven't asked my permission. I think you
ought to be careful, or I might do something about it pretty soon."
Wienis' gaze was cold. "May I refer to you as 'your majesty'?"
"Yes."
"Very well! You are a fool, your majesty!"
His dark eyes blazed from beneath his grizzled brows and the young king sat down slowly. For
a moment, there was sardonic satisfaction in the regent's face, but it faded quickly. His thick
lips parted in a smile and one hand fell upon the king's shoulder.
"Never mind, Lepold. I should not have spoken harshly to you. It is difficult sometimes to
behave with true propriety when the pressure of events is such as - You understand?" But if
the words were conciliatory, there was something in his eyes that had not softened.
Lepold said uncertainly, "Yes. Affairs of State are deuced difficult, you know." He wondered, not
without apprehension, whether he were not in for a dull siege of meaningless details on the
year's trade with Smyrno and the long, wrangling dispute over the sparsely settled worlds on
the Red Corridor.
Wienis was speaking again. "My boy, I had thought to speak of this to you earlier, and perhaps
I should have, but I know that your youthful spirits are impatient of the dry detail of statecraft."
Lepold nodded. "Well, that's all right-"
His uncle broke in firmly and continued, "However, you will come of age in two months.
Moreover, in the difficult times that are coming, you will have to take a full and active part. You
will be king henceforward, Lepold."
Again Lepold nodded, but his expression was quite blank.
"There will be war, Lepold."
"War! But there's been truce with Smyrno-"
"Not Smyrno. The Foundation itself."
"But, uncle, they've agreed to repair the ship. You said-"
His voice choked off at the twist of his uncle's lip.
"Lepold" - some of the friendliness had gone -"we are to talk man to man. There is to be war
with the Foundation, whether the ship is repaired or not; all the sooner, in fact, since it is being
repaired. The Foundation is the source of power and might. All the greatness of Anacreon; all
its ships and its cities and its people and its commerce depend on the dribbles and leavings of
power that the Foundation have given us grudgingly. I remember the time - I, myself - when
the cities of Anacreon were warmed by the burning of coal and oil. But never mind that; you
would have no conception of it."
"It seems," suggested the king timidly, "that we ought to be grateful-"
"Grateful?" roared Wienis. "Grateful that they begrudge us the merest dregs, while keeping
space knows what for themselves - and keeping it with what purpose in mind? Why, only that
they may some day rule the Galaxy."
His hand came down on his nephew's knee, and his eyes narrowed. "Lepold, you are king of
Anacreon. Your children and your children's children may be kings of the universe - if you have
the power that the Foundation is keeping from us!"
"There's something in that." Lepold's eyes gained a sparkle and his back straightened. "After
all, what right have they to keep it to themselves? Not fair, you know. Anacreon counts for
something, too."
"You see, you're beginning to understand. And now, my boy, what if Smyrno decides to attack
the Foundation for its own part and thus gains all that power? How long do you suppose we
could escape becoming a vassal power? How long would you hold your throne?"
Lepold grew excited. "Space, yes. You're absolutely right, you know. We must strike first. It's
simply self-defense."
Wienis' smile broadened slightly. "Furthermore, once, at the very beginning of the reign of your
grandfather, Anacreon actually established a military base on the Foundation's planet,
Terminus - a base vitally needed for national defense. We were forced to abandon that base
as a result of the machinations of the leader of that Foundation, a sly cur, a scholar, with not a
drop of noble blood in his veins. You understand, Lepold? Your grandfather was humiliated by
this commoner. I remember him! He was scarcely older than myself when he came to
Anacreon with his devil's smile and devil's brain - and the power of the other three kingdoms
behind him, combined in cowardly union against the greatness of Anacreon."
Lepold flushed and the sparkle in his eyes blazed. "By Seldon, if I had been my grandfather, I
would have fought even so."
"No, Lepold. We decided to wait - to wipe out the insult at a fitter time. It had been your father's
hope, before his untimely death, that he might be the one to - Well, well!" Wienis turned away
for a moment. Then, as if stifling emotion, "He was my brother. And yet, if his son were-"
"Yes, uncle, I'll not fail him. I have decided. It seems only proper that Anacreon wipe out this
nest of troublemakers, and that immediately."
"No, not immediately. First, we must wait for the repairs of the battle cruiser to be completed.
The mere fact that they are willing to undertake these repairs proves that they fear us. The
fools attempt to placate us, but we are not to be turned from our path, are we?"
And Lepold's fist slammed against his cupped palm.
"Not while I am king in Anacreon."
Wienis' lip twitched sardonically. "Besides which we must wait for Salvor Hardin to arrive."
"Salvor Hardin!" The king grew suddenly round-eyed, and the youthful contour of his beardless
face lost the almost hard lines into which they had been compressed.
"Yes, Lepold, the leader of the Foundation himself is coming to Anacreon on your birthday -
probably to soothe us with buttered words. But it won't help him."
"Salvor Hardin!" It was the merest murmur.
Wienis frowned. "Are you afraid of the name? It is the same Salvor Hardin, who on his previous
visit, ground our noses into the dust. You're not forgetting that deadly insult to the royal house?
And from a commoner. The dregs of the gutter."
"No. I guess not. No, I won't. I won't! We'll pay him back - but.. .but - I'm afraid - a little."
The regent rose. "Afraid? Of what? Of what, you young-" He choked off.
"It would be. ..uh.. .sort of blasphemous, you know, to attack the Foundation. I mean-" He
paused.
"Go on."
Lepold said confusedly, "I mean, if there were really a Galactic Spirit, he...uh...it mightn't like it.
Don't you think?
"No, I don't," was the hard answer. Wienis sat down again and his lips twisted in a queer smile.
"And so you
really bother your head a great deal over the Galactic Spirit, do you? That's what comes of
letting you run wild. You've been listening to Verisof quite a bit, I take it."
He's explained a great deal-'
About the Galactic Spirit?"
"Yes."
"Why, you unweaned cub, he believes in that mummery a good deal less than I do, and I don't
believe in it at all. How many times have you been told that all this talk is nonsense?"
"Well, I know that. But Verisof says-"
"Pay no heed to Verisof. It's nonsense."
There was a short, rebellious silence, and then Lepold said, "Everyone believes it just the
same. I mean all this talk about the Prophet Hari Seldon and how he appointed the Foundation
to carry on his commandments that there might some day be a return of the Galactic Paradise:
and how anyone who disobeys his commandments will be destroyed for eternity. They believe
it. I've presided at festivals, and I'm sure they do."
"Yes, they do ; but we don't. And you may be thankful it's so, for according to this foolishness,
you are king by divine right - and are semi-divine yourself. Very handy. It eliminates all
possibilities of revolts and insures absolute obedience in everything. And that is why, Lepold,
you must take an active part in ordering the war against the Foundation. I am only regent, and
quite human. You are king, and more than half a god - to them."
"But I suppose I'm not really," said the king reflectively.
"No, not really," came the sardonic response, "but you are to everyone but the people of the
Foundation. Get that? To everyone but those of the Foundation. Once they are removed there
will be no one to deny you the godhead. Think of that!"
"And after that we will ourselves be able to operate the power boxes of the temples and the
ships that fly without men and the holy food that cures cancer and all the rest? Verisof said only
those blessed with the Galactic Spirit could-"
"Yes, Verisof said! Verisof, next to Salvor Hardin, is your greatest enemy. Stay with me, Lepold,
and don't worry about them. Together we will recreate an empire-not just the kingdom of
Anacreon-but one comprising every one of the billions of suns of the Empire. Is that better than
a wordy 'Galactic Paradise'?"
"Ye-es."
"Can Verisof promise more?"
"No."
"Very well." His voice became peremptory. "I suppose we may consider the matter settled." He
waited for no answer. "Get along. I'll be down later. And just one thing, Lepold."
The young king turned on the threshold.
Wienis was smiling with all but his eyes. "Be careful on these Nyak hunts, my boy. Since the
unfortunate accident to your father, I have had the strangest presentiments concerning you, at
times. In the confusion, with needle guns thickening the air with darts, one can never tell. You
will be careful, I hope. And you'll do as I say about the Foundation, won't you?"
Lepold's eyes widened and dropped away from those of his uncle. "Yes - certainly."
"Good!" He stared after his departing nephew, expressionlessly, and returned to his desk.
And Lepold's thoughts as he left were somber and not unfearful. Perhaps it would be best to
defeat the Foundation and gain the power Wienis spoke of. But afterward, when the war was
over and he was secure on his throne- He became acutely conscious of the fact that Wienis
and his two arrogant sons were at present next in line to the throne.
But he was king. And kings could order people executed.
Even uncles and cousins.
4 .
Next to Sermak himself, Lewis Bort was the most active in rallying those dissident elements
which had fused into the now-vociferous Action Party. Yet he had not been one of the
deputation that had called on Salvor Hardin almost half a year previously. That this was so was
not due to any lack of recognition of his efforts; quite the contrary. He was absent for the very
good reason that he was on Anacreon's capital world at the time.
He visited it as a private citizen. He saw no official and he did nothing of importance. He merely
watched the obscure comers of the busy planet and poked his stubby nose into dusty crannies.
He arrived home toward the end of a short winter day that had started with clouds and was
finishing with snow and within an hour was seated at the octagonal table in Sermak's home.
His first words were not calculated to improve the atmosphere of a gathering already
considerably depressed by the deepening snow-filled twilight outside..
"I'm afraid," he said, "that our position is what is usually termed, in melodramatic phraseology, a
'Lost Cause.'"
"You think so?" said Sermak, gloomily.
"It's gone past thought, Sermak. There's no room for any other opinion."
"Armaments-" began Dokor Walto, somewhat officiously, but Bort broke in at once.
"Forget that. That's an old story." His eyes traveled round the circle. "I'm referring to the people.
I admit that it was my idea originally that we attempt to foster a palace rebellion of some sort to
install as king someone more favorable to the Foundation. It was a good idea. It still is. The
only trifling flaw about it is that it is impossible. The great Salvor Hardin saw to that."
Sermak said sourly, "If you'd give us the details, Bort-"
"Details! There aren't any! It isn't as simple as that. It's the whole damned situation on
Anacreon. It's this religion the Foundation has established. It works!"
"Well!"
"You've got to see it work to appreciate it. All you see here is that we have a large school
devoted to the training of priests, and that occasionally a special show is put on in some
obscure comer of the city for the benefit of pilgrims and that's all. The whole business hardly
affects us as a general thing. But on Anacreon-"
Lem Tarki smoothed his prim little Vandyke with one finger, and cleared his throat. "What kind
of religion is it? Hardin's always said that it was just a fluffy flummery to get them to accept our
science without question. You remember, Sermak, he told us that day-"
"Hardin's explanations," reminded Sermak, "don't often mean much at face value. But what kind
of a religion is it, Bort?"
Bort considered. "Ethically, it's fine. It scarcely varies from the various philosophies of the old
Empire. High moral standards and all that. There's nothing to complain about from that
viewpoint. Religion is one of the great civilizing influences of history and in that respect, it's
fulfilling-"
"We know that," interrupted Sermak, impatiently. "Get to the point."
"Here it is." Bort was a trifle disconcerted, but didn't show it. "The religion - which the
Foundation has fostered and encouraged, mind you - is built on on strictly authoritarian lines.
The priesthood has sole control of the instruments of science we have given Anacreon, but
they've learned to handle these tools only empirically. They believe in this religion entirely, and
in the ... uh ... spiritual value of the power they handle. For instance, two months ago some fool
tampered with the power plant in the Thessalekian Temple - one of the large ones. He
contaminated the city, of course. It was considered divine vengeance by everyone, including
the priests."
"I remember. The papers had some garbled version of the story at the time. I don't see what
you're driving at."
"Then, listen," said Bort, stiffly. "The priesthood forms a hierarchy at the apex of which is the
king, who is regarded as a sort of minor god. He's an absolute monarch by divine right, and the
people believe it, thoroughly, and the priests, too. You can't overthrow a king like that. Now do
you get the point?"
"Hold on," said Walto, at this point. "What did you mean when you said Hardin's done all this?
How does he come in?"
Bort glanced at his questioner bitterly. "The Foundation has fostered this delusion assiduously.
We've put all our scientific backing behind the hoax. There isn't a festival at which the king does
not preside surrounded by a radioactive aura shining forth all over his body and raising itself
like a coronet above his head. Anyone touching him is severely burned. He can move from
place to place through the air at crucial moments, supposedly by inspiration of divine spirit. He
fills the temple with a pearly, internal light at a gesture. There is no end to these quite simple
tricks that we perform for his benefit; but even the priests believe them, while working them
personally."
"Bad!" said Sermak, biting his lip.
"I could cry - like the fountain in City Hall Park," said Bort, earnestly, "when I think of the
chance we muffed. Take the situation thirty years ago, when Hardin saved the Foundation from
Anacreon - At that time, the Anacreonian people had no real conception of the fact that the
Empire was running down. They had been more or less running their own affairs since the
Zeonian revolt, but even after communications broke down and Lepold's pirate of a grandfather
made himself king, they never quite realized the Empire had gone kaput.
"If the Emperor had had the nerve to try, he could have taken over again with two cruisers and
with the help of the internal revolt that would have certainly sprung to life. And we we could
have done the same; but no, Hardin established monarch worship. Personally, I don't
understand it. Why? Why? Why?"
"What," demanded Jaim Orsy, suddenly, "does Verisof do? There was a day when he was an
advanced Actionist. What's he doing there? Is he blind, too?"
"I don't know," said Bort, curtly. "He's high priest to them. As far as I know, he does nothing but
act as adviser to the priesthood on technical details. Figurehead, blast him, figurehead!"
There was silence all round and all eyes turned to Sermak. The young party leader was biting a
fingernail nervously, and then said loudly, "No good. It's fishy!"
He looked around him, and added more energetically, "Is Hardin then such a fool?"
"Seems to be," shrugged Bort.
"Never! There's something wrong. To cut our own throats so thoroughly and so hopelessly
would require colossal stupidity. More than Hardin could possibly have even if he were a fool,
which I deny. On the one hand, to establish a religion that would wipe out all chance of internal
troubles. On the other hand, to arm Anacreon with all weapons of warfare. I don't see it."
"The matter is a little obscure, I admit," said Bort, "but the facts are there. What else can we
think?"
Walto said, jerkily, "Outright treason. He's in their pay."
But Sermak shook his head impatiently. "I don't see that, either. The whole affair is as insane
and meaningless - Tell me, Bort, have you heard anything about a battle cruiser that the
Foundation is supposed to have put into shape for use in the Anacreon navy?"
"Battle cruiser?"
"An old Imperial cruiser-"
"No, I haven't. But that doesn't mean much. The navy yards are religious sanctuaries
completely inviolate on the part of the lay public. No one ever hears anything about the fleet.
"Well, rumors have leaked out. Some of the Party have brought the matter up in Council.
Hardin never denied it, you know. His spokesmen denounced rumor mongers and let it go at
that. It might have significance."
"It's of a piece with the rest," said Bort. "if true, it's absolutely crazy. But it wouldn't be worse
than the rest."
"I suppose," said Orsy, "Hardin hasn't any secret weapon waiting. That might-"
"Yes," said Sermak, viciously, "a huge jack-in-the-box that will jump out at the psychological
moment and scare old Wienis into fits. The Foundation may as well blow itself out of existence
and save itself the agony of suspense if it has to depend on any secret weapon."
"Well," said Orsy, changing the subject hurriedly, "the question comes down to this: How much
time have we left? Eli, Bort?"
"All fight. It is the question. But don't look at me; I don't know. The Anacreonian press never
mentions the Foundation at all. Right now, it's full of the approaching celebrations and nothing
else. Lepold is coming of age next week, you know."
"We have months then." Walto smiled for the first time that evening. "That gives us time-"
"That gives us time, my foot," ground out Bort, impatiently. "The king's a god, I tell you. Do you
suppose he has to carry on a campaign of propaganda to get his people into fighting spirit? Do
you suppose he has to accuse us of aggression and pull out all stops on cheap emotionalism?
When the time comes to strike, Lepold gives the order and the people fight. Just like that.
That’s the damnedness of the system. You don’t question a god. He may give the order
tomorrow for all I know; and you can wrap tobacco round that and smoke it."
Everyone tried to talk at once and Sermak was slamming the table for silence, when the front
door opened and Levi Norast stamped in. He bounded up the stairs, overcoat on, trailing snow.
"Look at that!" he cried, tossing a cold, snow-speckled newspaper onto the table. "The
visicasters are full of it, too."
The newspaper was unfolded and five heads bent over it.
Sermak said, in a hushed voice, "Great Space, he’s going to Anacreon! Going to Anacreon!"
It is treason," squeaked Tarki, in sudden excitement. "I’ll be damned if Walto isn’t right. He’s
sold us out and now he’s going there to collect his wage.
Sermak had risen. "We’ve no choice now. I’m going to ask the Council tomorrow that Hardin be
impeached. And if that fails-"
5.
The snow had ceased, but it caked the ground deeply now and the sleek ground car advanced
through the deserted streets with lumbering effort. The murky gray light of incipient dawn was
cold not only in the poetical sense but also in a very literal way - and even in the then turbulent
state of the Foundation's politics, no one, whether Actionist or pro-Hardin found his spirits
sufficiently ardent to begin street activity that early.
Yohan Lee did not like that and his grumblings grew audible. "It's going to look bad, Hardin.
They're going to say you sneaked away."
"Let them say it if they wish. I've got to get to Anacreon and I want to do it without trouble. Now
that's enough, Lee."
Hardin leaned back into the cushioned seat and shivered slightly. It wasn't cold inside the
well-heated car, but there was something frigid about a snow-covered world, even through
glass, that annoyed him.
He said, reflectively, "Some day when we get around to it we ought to weather-condition
Terminus. It could be done."
"I," replied Lee, "would like to see a few other things done first. For instance, what about
weather-conditioning Sermak? A nice, dry cell fitted for twenty-five centigrade all year round
would be just fight."
"And then I'd really need bodyguards," said Hardin, "and not just those two," He indicated two
of Lee's bully-boys sitting up front with the driver, hard eyes on the empty streets, ready hands
at their atom blasts. "You evidently want to stir up civil war."
"I do? There are other sticks in the fire and it won't require much stirring, I can tell you." He
counted off on blunt fingers, "One: Sermak raised hell yesterday in the City Council and called
for an impeachment."
"He had a perfect right to do so," responded Hardin, coolly. "Besides which, his motion was
defeated 206 to 184."
"Certainly. A majority of twenty-two when we had counted on sixty as a minimum. Don't deny it;
you know you did."
It was close," admitted Hardin.
"All right. And two; after the vote, the fifty-nine members of the Actionist Party reared upon their
hind legs and stamped out of the Council Chambers."
Hardin was silent, and Lee continued, "And three: Before leaving, Sermak howled that you
were a traitor, that you were going to Anacreon to collect your payment, that the Chamber
majority in refusing to vote impeachment had participated in the treason, and that the name of
their party was not 'Actionist' for nothing. What does that sound like?"
"Trouble, I suppose."
"And now you're chasing off at daybreak, like a criminal. You ought to face them, Hardin - and
if you have to, declare martial law, by space!"
"Violence is the last refuge-"
"-Of the incompetent. Bah!"
"All right. We'll see. Now listen to me carefully, Lee. Thirty years ago, the Time Vault opened,
and on the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Foundation, there appeared a Hari Seldon
recording to give us our first idea of what was really going on."
"I remember," Lee nodded reminiscently, with a half smile. "It was the day we took over the
government."
"That's right. It was the time of our first major crisis. This is our second-and three weeks from
today will be the eightieth anniversary of the beginning of the Foundation. Does that strike you
as in any way significant?"
"You mean he's coming again?"
"I'm not finished. Seldon never said anything about returning, you understand, but that's of a
piece with his whole plan. He's always done his best to keep all foreknowledge from us. Nor is
there any way of telling whether the computer is set for further openings short of dismantling
the Vault - and it's probably set to destroy itself if we were to try that. I've been there every
anniversary since the first appearance, just on the chance. He's never shown up, but this is the
first time since then that there's really been a crisis."
"Then he'll come."
"Maybe. I don't know. However, this is the point. At today's session of the Council, just after you
announce that I have left for Anacreon, you will further announce, officially, that on March 14th
next, there will be another Hari Seldon recording, containing a message of the utmost
importance regarding the recent successfully concluded crisis. That's very important, Lee. Don't
add anything more no matter how many questions are asked."
Lee stared. "Will they believe it?"
"That doesn't matter. It will confuse them, which is all I want. Between wondering whether it is
true and what I mean by it if it isn't - they'll decide to postpone action till after March 1 4th. I'll be
back considerably before then."
Lee looked uncertain. "But that 'successfully concluded.' That's bull!"
"Highly confusing bull. Here's the airport!"
The waiting spaceship bulked somberly in the dimness. Hardin stamped through the snow
toward it and at the open air lock turned about with outstretched hand.
"Good-by, Lee. I hate to leave you in the frying pan like this, but there's not another I can trust.
Now please keep out of the fire."
"Don't worry. The frying pan is hot enough. I'll follow orders." He stepped back, and the air lock
closed.
6 .
Salvor Hardin did not travel to the planet Anacreon - from which planet the kingdom derived its
name - immediately. It was only on the day before the coronation that he arrived, after having
made flying visits to eight of the larger stellar systems of the kingdom, stopping only long,
enough to confer with the local representatives of the Foundation.
The trip left him with an oppressive realization of the vastness of the kingdom. It was a little
splinter, an insignificant fly speck compared to the inconceivable reaches of the Galactic
Empire of which it had once formed so distinguished a part; but to one whose habits of thought
had been built around a single planet, and a sparsely settled one at that, Anacreon's size in
area and population was staggering.
Following closely the boundaries of the old Prefect of Anacreon, it embraced twenty-five stellar
systems, six of which included more than one inhabited world. The population of nineteen
billion, though still far less than it had been in the Empire's heyday was rising rapidly with the
increasing scientific development fostered by the Foundation.
And it was only now that Hardin found himself floored by the magnitude of that task. Even in
thirty years, only the capital world had been powered. The outer provinces still possessed
immense stretches where nuclear power had not yet been re-introduced. Even the progress
that had been made might have been impossible had it not been for the still workable relics left
over by the ebbing tide of Empire.
When Hardin did arrive at the capital world, it was to find all normal business at an absolute
standstill. In the outer provinces there had been and still were celebrations; but here on the
planet Anacreon, not a person but took feverish part in the hectic religious pageantry that
heralded the coming-of-age of their god-king, Lepold.
Hardin had been able to snatch only half an hour from a haggard and harried Verisof before his
ambassador was forced to rush off to supervise still another temple festival. But the half-hour
was a most profitable one, and Hardin prepared himself for the night's fireworks well satisfied.
In all, he acted as an observer, for he had no stomach for the religious tasks he would
undoubtedly have had to undertake if his identity became known. So, when the palace's
ballroom filled itself with a glittering horde of the kingdom's very highest and most exalted
nobility, he found himself hugging the wall, little noticed or totally ignored.
He had been introduced to Lepold as one of a long line of introducees, and from a safe
distance, for the king stood apart in lonely and impressive grandeur, surrounded by his deadly
blaze of radioactive aura. And in less than an hour this same king would take his seat upon the
massive throne of rhodium-iridium alloy with jewel-set gold chasings, and then, throne and all
would rise maestically into the air, skim the ground slowly to hover before the great window
from which the great crowds of common folk could see their king and shout themselves into
near apoplexy. The throne would not have been so massive, of course, if it had not had a
shielded nuclear motor built into it.
It was past eleven. Hardin fidgeted and stood on his toes to better his view. He resisted an
impulse to stand on a chair. And then he saw Wienis threading through the crowd toward him
and he relaxed.
Wienis' progress was slow. At almost every step, he had to pass a kindly sentence with some
revered noble whose grandfather had helped Lepold's grandfather brigandize the kingdom and
had received a dukedom therefor.
And then he disentangled himself from the last uniformed peer and reached Hardin. His smile
crooked itself into a smirk and his black eyes peered from under grizzled brows with glints of
satisfaction in them.
"My dear Hardin," he said, in a low voice, "you must expect to be bored, when you refuse to
announce your identity."
"I am not bored, your highness. This is all extremely interesting. We have no comparable
spectacles on Terminus, you know."
"No doubt. But would you care to step into my private chambers, where we can speak at
greater length and with considerably more privacy?"
"Certainly."
With arms linked, the two ascended the staircase, and more than one dowager duchess stared
after them in surprise and wondered at the identity of this insignificantly dressed and
uninteresting-looking stranger on whom such signal honor was being conferred by the prince
regent.
In Wienis' chambers, Hardin relaxed in perfect comfort and accepted with a murmur of gratitude
the glass of liquor that had been poured out by the regent's own hand.
"Locris wine, Hardin," said Wienis, "from the royal cellars. The real thing - two centuries in age.
It was laid down ten years before the Zeonian Rebellion."
"A really royal drink," agreed Hardin, politely. "To Lepold I, King of Anacreon."
They drank, and Wienis added blandly, at the pause, "And soon to be Emperor of the
Periphery, and further, who knows? The Galaxy may some day be reunited."
"Undoubtedly. By Anacreon?"
"Why not? With the help of the Foundation, our scientific superiority over the rest of the
Periphery would be undisputable."
Hardin set his empty glass down and said, "Well, yes, except that, of course, the Foundation is
bound to help any nation that requests scientific aid of it. Due to the high idealism of our
government and the great moral purpose of our founder, Hari Seldon, we are unable to play
favorites. That can't be helped, your highness."
Wienis' smile broadened. "The Galactic Spirit, to use the popular cant, helps those who help
themselves. I quite understand that, left to itself, the Foundation would never cooperate."
"I wouldn't say that. We repaired the Imperial cruiser for you, though my board of navigation
wished it for themselves for research purposes."
The regent repeated the last words ironically. "Research purposes! Yes! Yet you would not
have repaired it, had I not threatened war."
Hardin made a deprecatory gesture. "I don't know."
"I do. And that threat always stood."
"And still stands now?"
"Now it is rather too late to speak of threats." Wienis had cast a rapid glance at the clock on his
desk. "Look here, Hardin, you were on Anacreon once before. You were young then; we were
both young. But even then we had entirely different ways of looking at things. You're what they
call a man of peace, aren't you?"
"I suppose I am. At least, I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There
are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct."
"Yes. I've heard of your famous remark: 'Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.' And
yet" - the regent scratched one ear gently in affected abstraction -"I wouldn't call myself
exactly incompetent."
Hardin nodded politely and said nothing.
"And in spite of that," Wienis continued, "I have always believed in direct action. I have believed
in carving a straight path to my objective and following that path. I have accomplished much
that way, and fully expect to accomplish still more."
"I know," interrupted Hardin. "I believe you are carving a path such as you describe for yourself
and your children that leads directly to the throne, considering the late unfortunate death of the
king's father - your elder brother and the king's own precarious state of health. He is in a
precarious state of health, is he not?"
Wienis frowned at the shot, and his voice grew harder. "You might find it advisable, Hardin, to
avoid certain subjects. You may consider yourself privileged as mayor of Terminus to make ...
uh ... injudicious remarks, but if you do, please disabuse yourself of the notion. I am not one to
be frightened at words. It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced
boldly, and I have never turned my back upon one yet."
"I don't doubt that. What particular difficulty are you refusing to turn your back upon at the
present moment?"
"The difficulty, Hardin, of persuading the Foundation to co-operate. Your policy of peace, you
see, has led you into making several very serious mistakes, simply because you
underestimated the boldness of your adversary. Not everyone is as afraid of direct action as
you are."
"For instance?" suggested Hardin.
"For instance, you came to Anacreon alone and accompanied me to my chambers alone."
Hardin looked about him. "And what is wrong with that?"
"Nothing," said the regent, "except that outside this room are five police guards, well armed and
ready to shoot. I don't think you can leave, Hardin."
The mayor's eyebrows lifted, "I have no immediate desire to leave. Do you then fear me so
much?"
"I don't fear you at all. But this may serve to impress you with my determination. Shall we call it
a gesture?"
"Call it what you please," said Hardin, indifferently. "I shall not discommode myself over the
incident, whatever you choose to call it."
"I'm sure that attitude will change with time. But you have made another error, Hardin, a more
serious one. It seems that the planet Terminus is almost wholly undefended."
"Naturally. What have we to fear? We threaten no one's interest and serve all alike."
"And while remaining helpless," Wienis went on, "you kindly helped us to arm ourselves, aiding
us particularly in the development of a navy of our own, a great navy. In fact, a navy which,
since your donation of the Imperial cruiser, is quite irresistible."
"Your highness, you are wasting time." Hardin made as if to rise from his seat. "If you mean to
declare war, and are informing me of the fact, you will allow me to communicate with my
government at once."
"Sit down, Hardin. I am not declaring war, and you are not communicating with your
government at all. When the war is fought - not declared, Hardin, fought - the Foundation will
be informed of it in due time by the nuclear blasts of the Anacreonian navy under the lead of my
own son upon the flagship, Wienis, once a cruiser of the Imperial navy."
Hardin frowned. "When will all this happen?"
"If you're really interested, the ships of the fleet left Anacreon exactly fifty minutes ago, at
eleven, and the first shot will be fired as soon as they sight Terminus, which should be at noon
tomorrow. You may consider yourself a prisoner of war."
"That's exactly what I do consider myself, your highness," said Hardin, still frowning. "But I'm
disappointed."
Wienis chuckled contemptuously. "Is that all?"
"Yes. I had thought that the moment of coronation - midnight, you know - would be the logical
time to set the fleet in motion. Evidently, you wanted to start the war while you were still regent.
It would have been more dramatic the other way."
The regent stared. "What in Space are you talking about?"
"Don't you understand?" said Hardin, softly. "I had set my counterstroke for midnight."
Wienis started from his chair. "You are not bluffing me. There is no counterstroke. If you are
counting on the support of the other kingdoms, forget it. Their navies, combined, are no match
for ours."
"I know that. I don't intend firing a shot. It is simply that the word went out a week ago that at
midnight tonight, the planet Anacreon goes under the interdict."
"The interdict?"
"Yes. If you don't understand, I might explain that every priest in Anacreon is going on strike,
unless I countermand the order. But I can't while I'm being held incommunicado; nor do I wish
to even if I weren't!" He leaned forward and added, with sudden animation, "Do you realize,
your highness, that an attack on the Foundation is nothing short of sacrilege of the highest
order?"
Wienis was groping visibly for self-control. "Give me none of that, Hardin. Save it for the mob."
"My dear Wienis, whoever do you think I am saving it for? I imagine that for the last half hour
every temple on Anacreon has been the center of a mob listening to a priest exhorting them
upon that very subject. There's not a man or woman on Anacreon that doesn't know that their
government has launched a vicious, unprovoked attack upon the center of their religion. But it
lacks only four minutes of midnight now. You'd better go down to the ballroom to watch events.
I'll be safe here with five guards outside the door." He leaned back in his chair, helped himself
to another glass of Locris wine, and gazed at the ceiling with perfect indifference.
Wienis suddenly furious, rushed out of the room.
A hush had fallen over the elite in the ballroom, as a broad path was cleared for the throne.
Lepold sat on it now, hands solidly on its arms, head high, face frozen. The huge chandeliers
had dimmed and in the diffused multi-colored light from the tiny nucleo-bulbs that bespangled
the vaulted ceiling, the royal aura shone out bravely, lifting high above his head to form a
blazing coronet.
Wienis paused on the stairway. No one saw him; all eyes were on the throne. He clenched his
fists and remained where he was; Hardin would not bluff him into action.
And then the throne stiffed. Noiselessly, it lifted upward - and drifted. Off the dais, slowly down
the steps, and then horizontally, five centimetres off the floor, it worked itself toward the huge,
open window.
At the sound of the deep-toned bell that signified midnight, it stopped before the window - and
the king's aura died.
For a frozen split second, the king did not move, face twisted in surprise, without an aura,
merely human; and then the throne wobbled and dropped to the floor with a crashing thump,
just as every light in the palace went out.
Through the shrieking din and confusion, Wienis' bull voice sounded. "Get the flares! Get the
flares!"
He buffeted right and left through the crowd and forced his way to the door. From without,
palace guards had streamed into the darkness.
Somehow the flares were brought back to the ballroom; flares that were to have been used in
the gigantic torchlight procession through the streets of the city after the coronation.
Back to the ballroom guardsmen swarmed with torches - blue, green, and red; where the
strange light lit up frightened, confused faces.
"There is no harm done," shouted Wienis. "Keep your places. Power will return in a moment."
He turned to the captain of the guard who stood stiffly at attention. "What is it, Captain?"
"Your highness," was the instant response, "the palace is surrounded by the people of the city."
"What do they want?" snarled Wienis.
"A priest is at the head. He has been identified as High Priest Poly Verisof. He demands the
immediate release of Mayor Salvor Hardin and cessation of the war against the Foundation."
The report was made in the expressionless tones of an officer, but his eyes shifted uneasily.
Wienis cried, "if any of the rabble attempt to pass the palace gates, blast them out of existence.
For the moment, nothing more. Let them howl! There will be an accounting tomorrow."
The torches had been distributed now, and the ballroom was again alight. Wienis rushed to the
throne, still standing by the window, and dragged the stricken, wax-faced Lepold to his feet.
"Come with me." He cast one look out of the window. The city was pitch-black. From below
there were the hoarse confused cries of the mob. Only toward the fight, where the Argolid
Temple stood was there illumination. He swore angrily, and dragged the king away.
Wienis burst into his chambers, the five guardsmen at his heels. Lepold followed, wide-eyed,
scared speechless.
"Hardin," said Wienis, huskily, "you are playing with forces too great for you."
The mayor ignored the speaker. In the pearly light of the pocket nucleo-bulb at his side, he
remained quietly seated, a slightly ironic smile on his face.
"Good morning, your majesty," he said to Lepold. "I congratulate you on your coronation."
"Hardin," cried Wienis again, "order your priests back to their jobs."
Hardin looked up coolly. "Order them yourself, Wienis, and see who is playing with forces too
great for whom. Right now, there's not a wheel turning in Anacreon. There's not a light burning,
except in the temples. There's not a drop of water running, except in the temples. On the wintry
half of the planet, there's not a calorie of heat, except in the temples. The hospitals are taking in
no more patients. The power plants have shut down. All ships are grounded. If you don't like it,
Wienis, you can order the priests back to their jobs. I don't wish to."
"By Space, Hardin, I will. If it's to be a showdown, so be it. We'll see if your priests can
withstand the army. Tonight, every temple on the planet will be put under army supervision."
"Very good, but how are you going to give the orders? Every line of communication on the
planet is shut down. You'll find that neither wave nor hyperwave will work. In fact, the only
communicator of the planet that will work - outside of the temples, of course - is the televisor
right here in this room, and I've fitted it only for reception."
Wienis struggled vainly for breath, and Hardin continued, "If you wish you can order your army
into the Argolid Temple just outside the palace and then use the ultrawave sets there to contact
other portions of the planet. But if you do that, I'm afraid the army contigent will be cut to pieces
by the mob, and then what will protect your palace, Wienis? And your lives, Wienis?"
Wienis said thickly, "We can hold out, devil. We'll last the day. Let the mob howl and let the
power die, but we'll hold out. And when the news comes back that the Foundation has been
taken, your precious mob will find upon what vacuum their religion has been built, and they'll
desert your priests and turn against them. I give you until noon tomorrow, Hardin, because you
can stop the power on Anacreon but you can't stop my fleet. " His voice croaked exultantly.
"They're on their way, Hardin, with the great cruiser you yourself ordered repaired, at the head."
Hardin replied lightly. "Yes, the cruiser I myself ordered repaired - but in my own way. Tell me,
Wienis, have you ever heard of a hyperwave relay? No, I see you haven't. Well, in about two
minutes you'll find out what one can do."
The televisor flashed to life as he spoke, and he amended, "No, in two seconds. Sit down,
Wienis. and listen."
7 .
Theo Aporat was one of the very highest ranking priests of Anacreon. From the standpoint of
precedence alone, he deserved his appointment as head priest- attendant upon the flagship
Wienis.
But it was not only rank or precedence. He knew the ship. He had worked directly under the
holy men from the Foundation itself in repairing the ship. He had gone over the motors under
their orders. He had rewired the 'visors; revamped the communications system; replated the
punctured hull; reinforced the beams. He had even been permitted to help while the wise men
of the Foundation had installed a device so holy it had never been placed in any previous ship,
but had been reserved only for this magnificent colossus of a vessel - a hyperwave relay.
It was no wonder that he felt heartsick over the purposes to which the glorious ship was
perverted. He had never wanted to believe what Verisof had told him - that the ship was to be
used for appalling wickedness; that its guns were to be turned on the great Foundation. Turned
on that Foundation, where he had been trained as a youth, from which all blessedness was
derived.
Yet he could not doubt now, after what the admiral had told him.
How could the king, divinely blessed, allow this abominable act? Or was it the king? Was it not,
perhaps, an action of the accursed regent, Wienis, without the knowledge of the king at all. And
it was the son of this same Wienis that was the admiral who five minutes before had told him:
"Attend to your souls and your blessings, priest. I will attend to my ship."
Aporat smiled crookedly. He would attend to his souls and his blessings - and also to his
cursings; and Prince Lefkin would whine soon enough.
He had entered the general communications room now. His. acolyte preceded him and the two
officers in charge made no move to interfere. The head priest-attendant had the right of free
entry anywhere on the ship.
"Close the door," Aporat ordered, and looked at the chronometer. It lacked Five minutes of
twelve. He had timed it well.
With quick practiced motions, he moved the little levers that opened all communications, so that
every part of the two-mile-long ship was within reach of his voice and his image.
"Soldiers of the royal flagship Wienis, attend! It is your priest-attendant that speaks!" The sound
of his voice reverberated, he knew, from the stem atom blast in the extreme rear to the
navigation tables in the prow.
"Your ship," he cried, "is engaged in sacrilege. Without your knowledge, it is performing such
an act as will doom the soul of every man among you to the eternal frigidity of space! Listen! It
is the intention of your commander to take this ship to the Foundation and there to bombard
that source of all blessings into submission to his sinful will. And since that is his intention, I, in
the name of the Galactic Spirit, remove him from his command, for there is no command where
the blessing of the Galactic Spirit has been withdrawn. The divine king himself may not
maintain his kingship without the consent of the Spirit."
His voice took on a deeper tone, while the acolyte listened with veneration and the two soldiers
with mounting fear. "And because this ship is upon such a devil's errand, the blessing of the
Spirit is removed from it as well."
He lifted his arms solemnly, and before a thousand televisors throughout the ship, soldiers
cowered, as the stately image of their priest-attendant spoke:
"In the name of the Galactic Spirit and of his prophet, Hari Seldon, and of his interpreters, the
holy men of the Foundation, I curse this ship. Let the televisors of this ship, which are its eyes,
become blind. Let its grapples, which are its arms, be paralyzed. Let the nuclear blasts, which
are its fists, lose their function. Let the motors, which are its heart, cease to beat. Let the
communications, which are its voice, become dumb. Let its ventilations, which are its breath,
fade. Let its lights, which are its soul, shrivel into nothing. In the name of the Galactic Spirit, I so
curse this ship."
And with his last word, at the stroke of midnight, a hand, light-years distant in the Argolid
Temple, opened an ultrawave relay, which at the instantaneous speed of the ultrawave, opened
another on the flagship Wienis.
And the ship died!
For it is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works, and that such curses as
that of Aporat's are really deadly.
Aporat saw the darkness close down on the ship and heard the sudden ceasing of the soft,
distant purring of the hyperatomic motors. Fie exulted and from the pocket of his long robe
withdrew a self-powered nucleo-bulb that filled the room with pearly light.
Fie looked down at the two soldiers who, brave men though they undoubtedly were, writhed on
their knees in the last extremity of mortal terror. "Save our souls, your reverence. We are poor
men, ignorant of the crimes of our leaders," one whimpered.
"Follow," said Aporat, sternly. "Your soul is not yet lost."
The ship was a turmoil of darkness in which fear was so thick and palpable, it was all but a
miasmic smell. Soldiers crowded close wherever Aporat and his circle of light passed, striving
to touch the hem of his robe, pleading for the tiniest scrap of mercy.
And always his answer was, "Follow me!"
Fie found Prince Lefkin, groping his way through the officers' quarters, cursing loudly for lights.
The admiral stared at the priest-attendant with hating eyes.
"There you are!" Lefkin inherited his blue eyes from his mother, but there was that about the
hook in his nose and the squint in his eye that marked him as the son of Wienis. "What is the
meaning of your treasonable actions? Return the power to the ship. I am commander here."
"No longer," said Aporat, somberly.
Lefkin looked about wildly. "Seize that man. Arrest him, or by Space, I will send every man
within reach of my voice out the air lock in the nude." Fie paused, and then shrieked, "It is your
admiral that orders. Arrest him."
Then, as he lost his head entirely, "Are you allowing yourselves to be fooled by this
mountebank, this harlequin? Do you cringe before a religion compounded of clouds and
moonbeams? This man is an imposter and the Galactic Spirit he speaks of a fraud of the
imagination devised to-"
Aporat interrupted furiously. "Seize the blasphemer. You listen to him at the peril of your souls."
And promptly, the noble admiral went down under the clutching hands of a score of soldiers.
"Take him with you and follow me."
Aporat turned, and with Lefkin dragged along after him, and the corridors behind black with
soldiery, he returned to the communications room. There, he ordered the ex-commander before
the one televisor that worked.
"Order the rest of the fleet to cease course and to prepare for the return to Anacreon."
The disheveled Lefkin, bleeding, beaten, and half stunned, did so.
"And now," continued Aporat, grimly, "we are in contact with Anacreon on the hyperwave beam.
Speak as I order you."
Lefkin made a gesture of negation, and the mob in the room and the others crowding the
corridor beyond, growled fearfully.
"Speak!" said Aporat. "Begin: The Anacreonian navy-"
Lefkin began.
8 .
There was absolute silence in Wienis' chambers when the image of Prince Lefkin appeared at
the televisor. There had been one startled gasp from the regent at the haggard face and
shredded uniform of his son, and then he collapsed into a chair, face contorted with surprise
and apprehension.
Hardin listened stolidly, hands clasped lightly in his lap, while the just-crowned King Lepold sat
shriveled in the most shadowy comer, biting spasmodically at his goldbraided sleeve. Even the
soldiers had lost the emotionless stare that is the prerogative of the military, and, from where
they lined up against the door, nuclear blasts ready, peered furtively at the figure upon the
televisor.
Lefkin spoke, reluctantly, with a tired voice that paused at intervals as though he were being
prompted-and not gently:
"The Anacreonian navy ... aware of the nature of its mission ... and refusing to be a party ... to
abominable sacrilage ... is returning to Anacreon ... with the following ultimatum issued ... to
those blaspheming sinners ... who would dare to use profane force ... against the Foundation ...
source of all blessings ... and against the Galactic Spirit. Cease at once all war against ... the
true faith . . . and guarantee in a manner suiting us of the navy ... as represented by our ...
priest-attendant, Theo Aporat ... that such war will never in the future ... be resumed, and that"-
here a long pause, and then continuing -"and that the one-time prince regent, Wienis ... be
imprisoned ... and tried before an ecclesiastical court ... for his crimes. Otherwise the royal navy
... upon returning to Anacreon ... will blast the palace to the ground ... and take whatever other
measures ... are
necessary ... to destroy the nest of sinners ... and the den of destroyers ... of men's souls that
now prevail."
The voice ended with half a sob and the screen went blank.
Hardin's fingers passed rapidly over the nucleo-bulb and its light faded until in the dimness, the
hitherto regent, the king, and the soldiers were hazy-edged shadows; and for the first time it
could be seen that an aura encompassed Hardin.
It was not the blazing light that was the prerogative of kings, but one less spectacular, less
impressive, and yet one more effective in its own way, and more useful.
Hardin's voice was softly ironic as he addressed the same Wienis who had one hour earlier
declared him a prisoner of war and Terminus on the point of destruction, and who now was a
huddled shadow, broken and silent.
"There is an old fable," said Hardin, "as old perhaps as humanity, for the oldest records
containing it are merely copies of other records still older, that might interest you. It runs as
follows:
"A horse having a wolf as a powerful and dangerous enemy lived in constant fear of his life.
Being driven to desperation, it occured to him to seek a strong ally. Whereupon he approached
a man, and offered an alliance, pointing out that the wolf was likewise an enemy of the man.
The man accepted the partnership at once and offered to kill the wolf immediately, if his new
partner would only co-operate by placing his greater speed at the man's disposal. The horse
was willing, and allowed the man to place bridle and saddle upon him. The man mounted,
hunted down the wolf, and killed him.
"The horse, joyful and relieved, thanked the man, and said: 'Now that our enemy is dead,
remove your bridle and saddle and restore my freedom.'
"Whereupon the man laughed loudly and replied, 'Never!' and applied the spurs with a will."
Silence still. The shadow that was Wienis did not stir.
Hardin continued quietly, "You see the analogy, I hope. In their anxiety to cement forever
domination over their own people, the kings of the Four Kingdoms accepted the religion of
science that made them divine; and that same religion of science was their bridle and saddle,
for it placed the life blood of nuclear power in the hands of the priesthoodwho took their orders
from us, be it noted, and not from you. You killed the wolf, but could not get rid of the m-"
Wienis sprang to his feet and in the shadows, his eyes were maddened hollows. His voice was
thick, incoherent. "And yet I'll get you. You won't escape. You'll rot. Let them blow us up. Let
them blow everything up. You'll rot! I'll get you!
"Soldiers!" he thundered, hysterically. "Shoot me down that devil. Blast him! Blast him!"
Hardin turned about in his chair to face the soldiers and smiled. One aimed his nuclear blast
and then lowered it. The others never budged. Salvor Hardin, mayor of Terminus, surrounded
by that soft aura, smiling so confidently, and before whom all the power of Anacreon had
crumbled to powder was too much for them, despite the orders of the shrieking maniac just
beyond.
Wienis shouted incoherently and staggered to the nearest soldier. Wildly, he wrested the
nuclear blast from the man's hand-aimed it at Hardin, who didn't stir, shoved the lever and held
it contacted.
The pale continous beam impinged upon the force-field that surrounded the mayor of Terminus
and was sucked harmlessly to neutralization. Wienis pressed harder and laughed tearingly.
Hardin still smiled and his force-field aura scarcely brightened as it absorbed the energies of
the nuclear blast. From his comer Lepold covered his eyes and moaned.
And, with a yell of despair, Wienis changed his aim and shot again - and toppled to the floor
with his head blown into nothingness.
Hardin winced at the sight and muttered, "A man of 'direct action' to the end. The last refuge!"
9 .
The Time Vault was filled; filled far beyond the available seating capacity, and men lined the
back of the room, three deep.
Salvor Hardin compared this large company with the few men attending the first appearance of
Hari Seldon, thirty years earlier. There had only been six, then; the five old Encyclopedists - all
dead now - and himself, the young figurehead of a mayor. It had been on that day, that he, with
Yohan Lee's assistance had removed the "figurehead" stigma from his office.
It was quite different now; different in every respect. Every man of the City Council was
awaiting Seldon's appearance. He, himself, was still mayor, but all-powerful now; and since the
utter rout of Anacreon, all-popular. When he had returned from Anacreon with the news of the
death of Wienis, and the new treaty signed with the trembling Lepold, he was greeted with a
vote of confidence of shrieking unanimity. When this was followed in rapid order, by similar
treaties signed with each of the other three kingdoms - treaties that gave the Foundation
powers such as would forever prevent any attempts at attack similar to that of Anacreon's -
torchlight processions had been held in every city street of Terminus. Not even Hari Seldon's
name had been more loudly cheered.
Hardin's lips twitched. Such popularity had been his after the first crisis also.
Across the room, Sef Sermak and Lewis Bort were engaged in animated discussion, and recent
events seemed to have put them out not at all. They had joined in the vote of confidence; made
speeches in which they publicly admitted that they had been in the wrong, apologized
handsomely for the use of certain phrases in earlier debates, excused themselves delicately by
declaring they had merely followed the dictates of their judgement and their conscience - and
immediately launched a new Actionist campaign.
Yohan Lee touched Hardin's sleeve and pointed significantly to his watch.
Hardin looked up. "Hello there, Lee. Are you still sour? What's wrong now?"
"He's due in five minutes, isn't he?"
"I presume so. He appeared at noon last time."
"What if he doesn't?"
"Are you going to wear me down with your worries all your life? If he doesn't, he won't."
Lee frowned and shook his head slowly. "If this thing flops, we're in another mess. Without
Seldon's backing for what we've done, Sermak will be free to start all over. He wants outright
annexation of the Four Kingdoms, and immediate expansion of the Foundation - by force, if
necessary. He's begun his campaign, already."
"I know. A fire eater must eat fire even if he has to kindle it himself. And you, Lee, have got to
worry even if you must kill yourself to invent something to worry about."
Lee would have answered, but he lost his breath at just that moment - as the lights yellowed
and went dim. He raised his arm to point to the glass cubicle that dominated half the room and
then collapsed into a chair with a windy sigh.
Hardin himself straightened at the sight of the figure that now filled the cubicle - a figure in a
wheel chair! He alone, of all those present could remember the day, decades ago, when that
figure had appeared first. He had been young then, and the figure old. Since then, the figure
had not aged a day, but he himself had in turn grown old.
The figure stared straight ahead, hands fingering a book in its lap.
It said, "I am Hari Seldon!" The voice was old and soft.
There was a breathless silence in the room and Hari Seldon continued conversationally, "This
is the second time I've been here. Of course, I don't know if any of you were here the first time.
In fact, I have no way of telling, by sense perception, that there is anyone here at all, but that
doesn't matter. If the second crisis has been overcome safely, you are bound to be here; there
is no way out. If you are not here, then the second crisis has been too much for you."
He smiled engagingly. "I doubt that, however, for my figures show a ninety-eight point four
percent probability there is to be no significant deviation from the Plan in the first eighty years.
"According to our calculations, you have now reached domination of the barbarian kingdoms
immediately surrounding the Foundation. Just as in the first crisis you held them off by use of
the Balance of Power, so in the second, you gained mastery by use of the Spiritual Power as
against the Temporal.
"However, I might warn you here against overconfidence. It is not my way to grant you any
foreknowledge in these recordings, but it would be safe to indicate that what you have now
achieved is merely a new balance-though one in which your position is considerably better. The
Spiritual Power, while sufficient to ward off attacks of the Temporal is not sufficient to attack in
turn. Because of the invariable growth of the counteracting force known as Regionalism, or
Nationalism, the Spiritual Power cannot prevail. I am telling you nothing new, I'm sure.
"You must pardon me, by the way, for speaking to you in this vague way. The terms I use are at
best mere approximations, but none of you is qualified to understand the true symbology of
psychohistory, and so I must do the best I can.
"In this case, the Foundation is only at the start of the path that leads to the Second Galactic
Empire. The neighboring kingdoms, in manpower and resources are still overwhelmingly
powerful as compared to yourselves. Outside them lies the vast tangled jungle of barbarism
that extends around the entire breadth of the Galaxy. Within that rim there is still what is left of
the Galactic Empire - and that, weakened and decaying though it is, is still incomparably
mighty."
At this point, Hari Seldon lifted his book and opened it. His face grew solemn. "And never forget
there was another Foundation established eighty years ago; a Foundation at the other end of
the Galaxy, at Star's End. They will always be there for consideration. Gentlemen, nine hundred
and twenty years of the Plan stretch ahead of you. The problem is yours!"
He dropped his eyes to his book and flicked out of existence, while the lights brightened to
fullness. In the babble that followed, Lee leaned over to Hardin's ear. "He didn't say when he'd
be back."
Hardin replied, "I know - but I trust he won't return until you and I are safely and cozily dead!"
PART IV
THE TRADERS
i.
TRADERS-... and constantly in advance of the political hegemony of the Foundation were the
Traders, reaching out tenuous fingerholds through the tremendous distances of the Periphery.
Months or years might pass between landings on Terminus; their ships were often nothing
more than patchquilts of home-made repairs and improvisations; their honesty was none of the
highest; their daring...
Through it all they forged an empire more enduring than the pseudo-religious despotism of the
Four Kingdoms...
Tales without end are told of these massive, lonely figures who bore half-seriously,
half-mockingly a motto adopted from one of Salvor Hardin's epigrams, "Never let your sense of
morals prevent you from doing what is right!" It is difficult now to tell which tales are real and
which apocryphal. There are none probably that have not suffered some exaggeration....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Limmar Ponyets was completely a-lather when the call reached his receiver - which proves
that the old bromide about telemessages and the shower holds true even in the dark, hard
space of the Galactic Periphery.
Luckily that part of a free-lance trade ship which is not given over to miscellaneous
merchandise is extremely snug. So much so, that the shower, hot water included, is located in
a two-by-four cubby, ten feet from the control panels. Ponyets heard the staccato rattle of the
receiver quite plainly.
Dripping suds and a growl, he stepped out to adjust the vocal, and three hours later a second
trade ship was alongside, and a grinning youngster entered through the air tube between the
ships.
Ponyets rattled his best chair forward and perched himself on the pilot-swivel.
"What've you been doing, Gorm?" he asked, darkly. "Chasing me all the way from the
Foundation?"
Les Gorm broke out a cigarette, and shook his head definitely, "Me? Not a chance. I'm just a
sucker who happened to land on Glyptal IV the day after the mail. So they sent me out after
you with this."
The tiny, gleaming sphere changed hands, and Gorm added, "It's confidential. Super-secret.
Can't be trusted to the sub-ether and all that. Or so I gather. At least, it's a Personal Capsule,
and won't open for anyone but you."
Ponyets regarded the capsule distastefully, "I can see that. And I never knew one of these to
hold good news, either."
It opened in his hand and the thin, transparent tape unrolled stiffly. His eyes swept the
message quickly, for when the last of the tape had emerged, the first was already brown and
crinkled. In a minute and a half it had turned black and, molecule by molecule, fallen apart.
Ponyets grunted hollowly, "Oh, Galaxy f
Les Gorm said quietly, "Can I help somehow? Or is it too secret?"
"It will bear telling, since you're of the Guild. I've got to go to Askone."
"That place? How come?"
"They've imprisoned a trader. But keep it to yourself."
Gorm's expression jolted into anger, "Imprisoned! That's against the Convention."
"So is the interference with local politics."
"Oh! Is that what he did?" Gorm meditated. "Who's the trader'? Anyone I know?"
"No!" said Ponyets sharply, and Gorm accepted the implication and asked no further questions.
Ponyets was up and staring darkly out the visiplate. He mumbled strong expressions at that
part of the misty lens-form that was the body of the Galaxy, then said loudly, "Damnedest
mess! I'm way behind quota."
Light broke on Gorm's intellect, "Hey, friend, Askone is a closed area."
"That's right. You can't sell as much as a penknife on Askone. They won't buy nuclear gadgets
of any sort. With my quota dead on its feet, it's murder to go there."
"Can't get out of it?"
Ponyets shook his head absently, A know the fellow involved. Can't walk out on a friend. What
of it? I am in the hands of the Galactic Spirit and walk cheerfully in the way he points out."
Gorm said blankly, "Huh?"
Ponyets looked at him, and laughed shortly, "I forgot. You never read the 'Bood of the Spirit,'
did you?"
"Never heard of it," said Gorm, curtly.
"Well, you would if you'd had a religious training."
"Religious training? For the priesthood?" Gorm was profoundly shocked.
"Afraid so. It's my dark shame and secret. I was too much for the Reverend Fathers, though,
They expelled me, for reasons sufficient to promote me to a secular education under the
Foundation. Well, look, I'd better push off. How's your quota this year?"
Gorm crushed out his cigarette and adjusted his cap, "I've got my last cargo going now. I'll
make it."
"Lucky fellow," gloomed Ponyets, and for many minutes after Les Gorm left, he sat in
motionless reverie.
So Eskel Gorov was on Askone - and in prison as well!
That was bad! In fact, considerably worse than it might appear. It was one thing to tell a curious
youngster a diluted version of the business to throw him off and send him about his own. It was
a thing of a different sort to face the truth.
For Limmar Ponyets was one of the few people who happened to know that Master Trader
Eskel Gorov was not a trader at all; but that entirely different thing, an agent of the Foundation!
2 .
Two weeks gone! Two weeks wasted.
One week to reach Askone, at the extreme borders of which the vigilant warships speared out
to meet him in converging numbers. Whatever their detection system was, it worked - and well.
They sidled him in slowly, without a signal, maintaining their cold distance, and pointing him
harshly towards the central sun of Askone.
Ponyets could have handled them at a pinch. Those ships were holdovers from the
dead-and-gone Galactic Empire - but they were sports cruisers, not warships; and without
nuclear weapons, they were so many picturesque and impotent ellipsoids. But Eskel Gorov was
a prisoner in their hands, and Gorov was not a hostage to lose. The Askonians must know that.
And then another week - a week to wind a weary way through the clouds of minor officials that
formed the buffer between the Grand Master and the outer world. Each little sub-secretary
required soothing and conciliation. Each required careful and nauseating milking for the
flourishing signature that was the pathway to the next official one higher up.
For the first time, Ponyets found his trader's identification papers useless.
I Now, at last, the Grand Master was on the other side of the Guard-flanked gilded door - and
two weeks had gone.
Gorov was still a prisoner and Ponyets' cargo rotted useless in the holds of his ship.
The Grand Master was a small man; a small man with a balding head and very wrinkled face,
whose body seemed weighed down to motionlessness by the huge, glossy fur collar about his
neck.
His fingers moved on either side, and the line of armed men backed away to for a passage,
along which Ponyets strode to the foot of the Chair of State.
"Don't speak," snapped the Grand Master, and Ponyets' opening lips closed tightly.
"That's right," the Askonian ruler relaxed visibly, "I can't endure useless chatter. You cannot
threaten and I won't abide flattery. Nor is there room for injured complaints. I have lost count of
the times you wanderers have been warned that your devil's machines are not wanted
anywhere in Askone."
"Sir," said Ponyets, quietly, "there is no attempt to justify the trader in question. It is not the
policy of traders to intrude where they are not wanted. But the Galaxy is great, and it has
happened before that a boundary has been trespassed unwittingly. It was a deplorable
mistake."
"Deplorable, certainly," squeaked the Grand Master. "But mistake? Your people on Glyptal IV
have been bombarding me with pleas for negotiation since two hours after the sacrilegious
wretch was seized. I have been warned by them of your own coming many times over. It seems
a well-organized rescue campaign. Much seems to have been anticipated - a little too much for
mistakes, deplorable or otherwise."
The Askonian's black eyes were scornful. He raced on, "And are you traders, flitting from world
to world like mad little butterflies, so mad in your own right that you can land on Askone's
largest world, in the center of its system, and consider it an unwitting boundary mixup? Come,
surely not."
Ponyets winced without showing it. He said, doggedly, "If the attempt to trade was deliberate,
your Veneration, it was most injudicious and contrary to the strictest regulations of our Guild."
"Injudicious, yes," said the Askonian, curtly. "So much so, that your comrade is likely to lose life
in payment."
Ponyets' stomach knotted. There was no irresolution there. He said, "Death, your Veneration, is
so absolute and irrevocable a phenomenon that certainly there must be some alternative."
There was a pause before the guarded answer came, "I have heard that the Foundation is
rich."
"Rich? Certainly. But our riches are that which you refuse to take. Our nuclear goods are
worth-"
"Your goods are worthless in that they lack the ancestral blessing. Your goods are wicked and
accursed in that they lie under the ancestral interdict." The sentences were intoned; the
recitation of a formula.
The Grand Master's eyelids dropped, and he said with meaning, "You have nothing else of
value?"
The meaning was lost on the trader, "I don't understand. What is it you want?"
The Askonian's hands spread apart, "You ask me to trade places with you, and make known to
you my wants. I think not. Your colleague, it seems, must suffer the punishment set for
sacrilege by the Askonian code. Death by gas. We are a just people. The poorest peasant, in
like case, would suffer no more. I, myself, would suffer no less."
Ponyets mumbled hopelessly, "Your Veneration, would it be permitted that I speak to the
prisoner?"
"Askonian law," said the Grand Master coldly, "allows no communication with a condemned
man."
Mentally, Ponyets held his breath, "Your Veneration, I ask you to be merciful towards a man's
soul, in the hour when his body stands forfeit. He has been separated from spiritual consolation
in all the time that his life has been in danger. Even now, he faces the prospect of going
unprepared to the bosom of the Spirit that rules all."
The Grand Master said slowly and suspiciously, "You are a Tender of the Soul?"
Ponyets dropped a humble head, "I have been so trained. In the empty expanses of space, the
wandering traders need men like myself to care for the spiritual side of a life so given over to
commerce and worldly pursuits."
The Askonian ruler sucked thoughtfully at his lower lip. "Every man should prepare his soul for
his journey to his ancestral spirits. Yet I had never thought you traders to be believers."
3 .
Eskel Gorov stirred on his couch and opened one eye as Limmar Ponyets entered the heavily
reinforced door. It boomed shut behind him. Gorov sputtered and came to his feet.
"Ponyets! They sent you?"
"Pure chance," said Ponyets, bitterly, "or the work of my own personal malevolent demon. Item
one, you get into a mess on Askone. Item two, my sales route, as known to the Board of Trade,
carries me within fifty parsecs of the system at just the time of item one. Item three, we've
worked together before and the Board knows it. Isn't that a sweet, inevitable set-up? The
answer just pops out of a slot."
"Be careful," said Gorov, tautly. "There'll be someone listening. Are you wearing a Field
Distorter?"
Ponyets indicated the ornamented bracelet that hugged his wrist and Gorov relaxed.
Ponyets looked about him. The cell was bare, but large. It was well-lit and it lacked offensive
odors. He said, "Not bad. They're treating you with kid gloves."
Gorov brushed the remark aside, "Listen, how did you get down here? I've been in strict solitary
for almost two weeks."
"Ever since I came, huh? Well, it seems the old bird who's boss here has his weak points. He
leans toward pious speeches, so I took a chance that worked. I'm here in the capacity of your
spiritual adviser. There's something about a pious man such as he. He will cheerfully cut your
throat if it suits him, but he will hesitate to endanger the welfare of your immaterial and
problematical soul. It's just a piece of empirical psychology. A trader has to know a little of
everything."
Gorov's smile was sardonic, "And you've been to theological school as well. You're all right,
Ponyets. I'm glad they sent you. But the Grand Master doesn't love my soul exclusively. Has he
mentioned a ransom?"
The trader's eyes narrowed, "He hinted - barely. And he also threatened death by gas. I played
safe, and dodged; it might easily have been a trap. So it's extortion, is it? What is it he wants?"
"Gold."
"Gold!" Ponyets frowned. "The metal itself? What for?"
"It's their medium of exchange."
"Is it? And where do I get gold from?"
"Wherever you can. Listen to me; this is important. Nothing will happen to me as long as the
Grand Master has the scent of gold in his nose. Promise it to him; as much as he asks for.
Then go back to the Foundation, if necessary, to get it. When I'm free, we'll be escorted out of
the system, and then we part company."
Ponyets stared disapprovingly, "And then you'll come back and try again."
"It's my assignment to sell nucleics to Askone."
"They'll get you before you've gone a parsec in space. You know that, I suppose."
"I don't," said Gorov. "And if I did, it wouldn't affect things."
"They'll kill you the second time."
Gorov shrugged.
Ponyets said quietly, "If I'm going to negotiate with the Grand Master again, I want to know the
whole story. So far, I've been working it too blind. As it was, the few mild remarks I did make
almost threw his Veneration into fits."
"It's simple enough," said Gorov. "The only way we can increase the security of the Foundation
here in the Periphery is to form a religion-controlled commercial empire. We're still too weak to
be able to force political control. It's all we can do to hold the Four Kingdoms."
Ponyets was nodding. "This I realize. And any system that doesn't accept nuclear gadgets can
never be placed under our religious control-"
"And can therefore become a focal point for independence and hostility. Yes."
"All right, then," said Ponyets, "so much for theory. Now what exactly prevents the sale.
Religion? The Grand Master implied as much."
"It's a form of ancestor worship. Their traditions tell of an evil past from which they were saved
by the simple and virtuous heroes of the past generations. It amounts to a distortion of the
anarchic period a century ago, when the imperial troops were driven out and an independent
government was set up. Advanced science and nuclear power in particular became identified
with the old imperial regime they remember with horror."
"That so? But they have nice little ships which spotted me very handily two parsecs away. That
smells of nucleics to me."
Gorov shrugged. "Those ships are holdovers of the Empire, no doubt. Probably with nuclear
drive. What they have, they keep. The point is that they will not innovate and their internal
economy is entirely non-nuclear. That is what we must change."
"Flow were you going to do it?"
"By breaking the resistance at one point. To put it simply, if I could sell a penknife with a
force-field blade to a nobleman, it would be to his interest to force laws that would allow him to
use it. Put that baldly, it sounds silly, but it is sound, psychologically. To make strategic sales,
at strategic points, would be to create a pro-nucleics faction at court."
"And they send you for that purpose, while I'm only here to ransom you and leave, while you
keep on trying? Isn't that sort of tail-backward?"
"In what way?" said Gorov, guardedly.
"Listen," Ponyets was suddenly exasperated, "you're a diplomat, not a trader, and calling you a
trader won't make you one. This case is for one who's made a business of selling - and I'm
here with a full cargo stinking into uselessness, and a quota that won't ever be met, it looks
like."
"You mean you're going to risk your life on something that isn't your business?" Gorov smiled
thinly.
Ponyets said, "You mean that this is a matter of patriotism and traders aren't patriotic?"
"Notoriously not. Pioneers never are."
"All right. I'll grant that. I don't scoot about space to save the Foundation or anything like that.
But I'm out to make money, and this is my chance. If it helps the Foundation at the same time,
all the better. And I've risked my life on slimmer chances."
Ponyets rose, and Gorov rose with him, "What are you going to do?"
The trader smiled, "Gorov, I don't know - not yet. But if the crux of the matter is to make a sale,
then I'm your man. I'm not a boaster as a general thing, but there's one thing I'll always back
up. I've never ended up below quota yet."
The door to the cell opened almost instantly when he knocked, and two guards fell in on either
side.
4 .
"A show!" said the Grand Master, grimly. Fie settled himself well into his furs, and one thin hand
grasped the iron cudgel he used as a cane.
"And gold, your Veneration."
"Anc/ gold," agreed the Grand Master, carelessly.
Ponyets set the box down and opened it with as fine an appearance of confidence as he could
manage. Fie felt alone in the face of universal hostility; the way he had felt out in space his first
year. The semicircle of bearded councilors who faced him down, stared unpleasantly. Among
them was Pherl, the thin-faced favorite who sat next to the Grand Master in stiff hostility.
Ponyets had met him once already and marked him immediately as prime enemy, and, as a
consequence, prime victim.
Outside the hall, a small army awaited events. Ponyets was effectively isolated from his ship;
he lacked any weapon, but his attempted bribe; and Gorov was still a hostage.
He made the final adjustments on the clumsy monstrosity that had cost him a week of
ingenuity, and prayed once again that the lead-lined quartz would stand the strain.
"What is it?" asked the Grand Master.
"This," said Ponyets, stepping back, "is a small device I have constructed myself."
"That is obvious, but it is not the information I want. Is it one of the black-magic abominations of
your world?"
"It is nuclear in nature, admitted Ponyets, gravely, "but none of you need touch it, or have
anything to do with it. It is for myself alone, and if it contains abominations, I take the foulness
of it upon myself."
The Grand Master had raised his iron cane at the machine in a threatening gesture and his lips
moved rapidly and silently in a purifying invocation. The thin-faced councilor at his right leaned
towards him and his straggled red mustache approached the Grand Master's ear. The ancient
Askonian petulantly shrugged himself free.
"And what is the connection of your instrument of evil and the gold that may save your
countryman's life?"
"With this machine," began Ponyets, as his hand dropped softly onto the central chamber and
caressed its hard, round flanks, "I can turn the iron you discard into gold of the finest quality. It
is the only device known to man that will take iron - the ugly iron, your Veneration, that props
up the chair you sit in and the walls of this building - and change it to shining, heavy, yellow
gold."
Ponyets felt himself botching it. His usual sales talk was smooth, facile and plausible; but this
limped like a shot-up space wagon. But it was the content, not the form, that interested the
Grand Master.
"So? Transmutation? Men have been fools who have claimed the ability. They have paid for
their prying sacrilege."
"Had they succeeded?"
"No." The Grand Master seemed coldly amused. "Success at producing gold would have been
a crime that carried its own antidote. It is the attempt plus the failure that is fatal. Here, what
can you do with my staff?" He pounded the floor with it.
"Your Veneration will excuse me. My device is a small model, prepared by myself, and your
staff is too long."
The Grand Master's small shining eye wandered and stopped, "Randel, your buckles. Come,
man, they shall be replaced double if need be."
The buckles passed down the line, hand to hand. The Grand Master weighed them
thoughtfully.
Here," he said, and threw them to the floor.
Ponyets picked them up. He tugged hard before the cylinder opened, and his eyes blinked and
squinted with effort as he centered the buckles carefully on the anode screen. Later, it would be
easier but there must be no failures the first time.
The homemade transmuter crackled malevolently for ten minutes while the odor of ozone
became faintly present. The Askonians backed away, muttering, and again Pherl whispered
urgently into his ruler's ear. The Grand Master's expression was stony. He did not budge.
And the buckles were gold.
Ponyets held them out to the Grand Master with a murmured, "Your Veneration!" but the old
man hesitated, then gestured them away. His stare lingered upon the transmuter.
Ponyets said rapidly, "Gentlemen, this is pure gold. Gold through and through. You may subject
it to every known physical and chemical test, if you wish to prove the point. It cannot be
identified from naturally-occurring gold in any way. Any iron can be so treated. Rust will not
interfere, not will a moderate amount of alloying metals-"
But Ponyets spoke only to fill a vacuum. He let the buckles remain in his outstretched hand,
and it was the gold that argued for him.
The Grand Master stretched out a slow hand at last, and the thin-faced Pherl was roused to
open speech. "Your Veneration, the gold is from a poisoned source."
And Ponyets countered, "A rose can grow from the mud, your Veneration. In your dealings with
your neighbors, you buy material of all imaginable variety, without inquiring as to where they
get it, whether from an orthodox machine blessed by your benign ancestors or from some
space-spawned outrage. Come, I don't offer the machine. I offer the gold."
"Your Veneration," said Pherl, "you are not responsible for the sins of foreigners who work
neither with your consent nor knowledge. But to accept this strange pseudo-gold made sinfully
from iron in your presence and with your consent is an affront to the living spirits of our holy
ancestors."
"Yet gold is gold," said the Grand Master, doubtfully, "and is but an exchange for the heathen
person of a convicted felon. Pherl, you are too critical." But he withdrew his hand.
Ponyets said, "You are wisdom, itself, your Veneration. Consider - to give up a heathen is to
lose nothing for your ancestors, whereas with the gold you get in exchange you can ornament
the shrines of their holy spirits. And surely, were gold evil in itself, if such, a thing could be, the
evil would depart of necessity once the metal were put to such pious use."
"Now by the bones of my grandfather," said the Grand Master with surprising vehemence. His
lips separated in a shrill laugh, "Pherl, what do you say of this young man? The statement is
valid. It is as valid as the words of my ancestors."
Pherl said gloomily, "So it would seem. Grant that the validity does not turn out to be a device
of the Malignant Spirit."
"I'll make it even better," said Ponyets, suddenly. "Hold the gold in hostage. Place it on the
altars of your ancestors as an offering and hold me for thirty days. If at the end of that time,
there is no evidence of displeasure - if no disasters occur - surely, it would be proof that the
offering was accepted. What more can be offered?"
And when the Grand Master rose to his feet to search out disapproval, not a man in the council
failed to signal his agreement. Even Pherl chewed the ragged end of his mustache and nodded
curtly.
Ponyets smiled and meditated on the uses of a religious education.
5 .
Another week rubbed away before the meeting with Pherl was arranged. Ponyets felt the
tension, but he was used to the feeling of physical helplessness now. He had left city limits
under guard. He was in Pherl's suburban villa under guard. There was nothing to do but accept
it without even looking over his shoulder.
Pherl was taller and younger outside the circle of Elders. In nonformal costume, he seemed no
Elder at all.
He said abruptly, "You're a peculiar man." His close-set eyes seemed to quiver. "You've done
nothing this last week, and particularly these last two hours, but imply that I need gold. It seems
useless labor, for who does not? Why not advance one step?"
"It is not simply gold," said Ponyets, discreetly. "Not simply gold. Not merely a coin or two. It is
rather all that lies behind gold."
"Now what can lie behind gold?" prodded Pherl, with a down-curved smile. "Certainly this is not
the preliminary of another clumsy demonstration."
"Clumsy?" Ponyets frowned slightly.
"Oh, definitely." Pherl folded his hands and nudged them gently with his chin. "I don't criticize
you. The clumsiness was on purpose, I am sure. I might have warned his Veneration of that,
had I been certain of the motive. Now had I been you, I would have produced the gold upon my
ship, and offered it alone. The show you offered us and the antagonism you aroused would
have been dispensed with."
"True," Ponyets admitted, "but since I was myself, I accepted the antagonism for the sake of
attracting your attention."
"Is that it? Simply that?" Pherl made no effort to hide his contemptuous amusement. "And I
imagine you suggested the thirty-day purification period that you might assure yourself time to
turn the attraction into something a bit more substantial. But what if the gold turns out to be
impure?"
Ponyets allowed himself a dark humor in return, "When the judgement of that impurity depends
upon those who are most interested in finding it pure?"
Pherl lifted his eyes and stared narrowly at the trader. He seemed at once surprised and
satisfied.
"A sensible point. Now tell me why you wished to attract me."
"This I will do. In the short time I have been here, I have observed useful facts that concern you
and interest me. For instance, you are young-very young for a member of the council, and even
of a relatively young family."
"You criticize my family?"
"Not at all. Your ancestors are great and holy; all will admit that. But there are those that say
you are not a member of one of the Five Tribes."
Pherl leaned back, "With all respect to those involved," and he did not hide his venom, "the Five
Tribes have impoverished loins and thin blood. Not fifty members of the Tribes are alive."
"Yet there are those who say the nation would not be willing to see any man outside the Tribes
as Grand Master. And so young and newly-advanced a favorite of the Grand Master is bound
to make powerful enemies among the great ones of the State - it is said. His Veneration is
aging and his protection will not last past his death, when it is an enemy of yours who will
undoubtedly be the one to interpret the words of his Spirit."
Pherl scowled, "For a foreigner you hear much. Such ears are made for cropping."
"That may be decided later."
"Let me anticipate." Pherl stirred impatiently in his seat. "You're going to offer me wealth and
power in terms of those evil little machines you carry in your ship. Well?"
"Suppose it so. What would be your objection? Simply your standard of good and evil?"
Pherl shook his head. "Not at all. Look, my Outlander, your opinion of us in your heathen
agnosticism is what it is - but I am not the entire slave of our mythology, though I may appear
so. I am an educated man, sir, and, I hope, an enlightened one. The full depth of our religious
customs, in the ritualistic rather than the ethical sense, is for the masses."
"Your objection, then?" pressed Ponyets, gently.
"Just that. The masses. I might be willing to deal with you, but your little machines must be
used to be useful. How might riches come to me, if I had to use - what is it you sell?- well, a
razor, for instance, only in the strictest, trembling secrecy. Even if my chin were more simply
and more cleanly shaven, how would I become rich? And how would I avoid death by gas
chamber or mob frightfulness if I were ever once caught using it?"
Ponyets shrugged, "You are correct. I might point out that the remedy would be to educate your
own people into the use of nucleics for their convenience and your own substantial profit. It
would be a gigantic piece of work; I don't deny it; but the returns would be still more gigantic.
Still that is your concern, and, at the moment, not mine at all. For I offer neither razor, knife, nor
mechanical garbage disposer."
"What do you offer?"
"Gold itself. Directly. You may have the machine I demonstrated last week."
And now Pherl stiffened and the skin on his forehead moved jerkily. "The transmuter?"
"Exactly. Your supply of gold will equal your supply of iron. That, I imagine, is sufficient for all
needs. Sufficient for the Grand Mastership itself, despite youth and enemies. And it is safe."
"In what way?"
"In that secrecy is the essence of its use; that same secrecy you described as the only safety
with regard to nucleics. You may bury the transmuter in the deepest dungeon of the strongest
fortress on your furthest estate, and it will still bring you instant wealth. It is the gold you buy,
not the machine, and that gold bears no trace of its manufacture, for it cannot be told from the
natural creation."
"And who is to operate the machine?"
"Yourself. Five minutes teaching is all you will require. I'll set it up for you wherever you wish."
"And in return?"
"Well," Ponyets grew cautious. "I ask a price and a handsome one. It is my living. Let us say,-
for it its a valuable machine - the equivalent of a cubic foot of gold in wrought iron."
Pherl laughed, and Ponyets grew red. "I point out, sir," he added, stiffly, "that you can get your
price back in two hours."
"True, and in one hour, you might be gone, and my machine might suddenly turn out to be
useless. I'll need a guarantee."
"You have my word."
"A very good one," Pherl bowed sardonically, "but your presence would be an even better
assurance. I'll give you my word to pay you one week after delivery in working order."
"Impossible."
"Impossible? When you've already incurred the death penalty very handily by even offering to
sell me anything. The only alternative is my word that you'll get the gas chamber tomorrow
otherwise."
Ponyet's face was expressionless, but his eyes might have flickered. He said, "It is an unfair
advantage. You will at least put your promise in writing?"
"And also become liable for execution? No, sir!" Pherl smiled a broad satisfaction. "No, sir! Only
one of us is a fool."
The trader said in a small voice, "It is agreed, then.
6 .
Gorov was released on the thirtieth day, and five hundred pounds of the yellowest gold took his
place. And with him was released the quarantined and untouched abomination that was his
ship.
Then, as on the journey into the Askonian system, so on the journey out, the cylinder of sleek
little ships ushered them on their way.
Ponyets watched the dimly sun-lit speck that was Gorov's ship while Gorov's voice pierced
through to him, clear and thin on the tight, distortion-bounded ether-beam.
He was saying, "But it isn't what's wanted, Ponyets. A transmuter won't do. Where did you get
one, anyway?"
"I didn't," Ponyets answer was patient. "I juiced it up out of a food irradiation chamber. It isn't
any good, really. The power consumption is prohibitive on any large scale or the Foundation
would use transmutation instead of chasing all over the Galaxy for heavy metals. It's one of the
standard tricks every trader uses, except that I never saw an iron-to-gold one before. But it's
impressive, and it works - very temporarily."
"All right. But that particular trick is no good."
"It got you out of a nasty spot."
"That is very far from the point. Especially since I've got to go back, once we shake our
solicitous escort."
"Why?"
"You yourself explained it to this politician of yours," Gorov's voice was on edge. "Your entire
sales-point rested on the fact that the transmuter was a means to an end, but of no value in
itself-, that he was buying the gold, not the machine. It was good psychology, since it worked,
but-"
"But?" Ponyets urged blandly and obtusely.
The voice from the receiver grew shriller, "But we want to sell them a machine of value in itself,
something they would want to use openly; something that would tend to force them out in favor
of nuclear techniques as a matter of self-interest."
"I understand all that," said Ponyets, gently. "You once explained it. But look at what follows
from my sale, will you? As long as that transmuter lasts, Pherl will coin gold; and it will last long
enough to buy him the next election. The present Grand Master won't last long."
"You count on gratitude?" asked Gorov, coldly.
"No - on intelligent self-interest. The transmuter gets him an election; other mechanisms-"
"No! No! Your premise is twisted. It's not the transmuter, he'll credit - it'll be the good,
old-fashioned gold. That's what I'm trying to tell you."
Ponyets grinned and shifted into a more comfortable position. All right. He'd baited the poor
fellow sufficiently. Gorov was beginning to sound wild.
The trader said, "Not so fast, Gorov. I haven't finished. There are other gadgets already
involved."
There was a short silence. Then, Gorov's voice sounded cautiously, "What other gadgets?"
Ponyets gestured automatically and uselessly, "You see that escort?"
"I do," said Gorov shortly. "Tell me about those gadgets."
"I will, -if you'll listen. That's Pherl's private navy escorting us; a special honor to him from the
Grand Master. He managed to squeeze that out."
"So?"
"And where do you think he's taking us? To his mining estates on the outskirts of Askone, that's
where. Listen!" Ponyets was suddenly fiery, "I told you I was in this to make money, not to save
worlds. All right. I sold that transmuter for nothing. Nothing except the risk of the gas chamber
and that doesn't count towards the quota."
"Get back to the mining estates, Ponyets. Where do they come in?"
"With the profits. We're stacking up on tin, Gorov. Tin to fill every last cubic foot this old scow
can scrape up, and then some more for yours. I'm going down with Pherl to collect, old man,
and you're going to cover me from upstairs with every gun you've got - just in case Pherl isn't
as sporting about the matter as he lets on to be. That tin's my profit."
"For the transmuter?"
"For my entire cargo of nucleics. At double price, plus a bonus." He shrugged, almost
apologetically. "I admit I gouged him, but I've got to make quota, don't I?"
Gorov was evidently lost. He said, weakly, "Do you mind explaining'?"
"What's there to explain? It's obvious, Gorov. Look, the clever dog thought he had me in a
foolproof trap, because his word was worth more than mine to the Grand Master. He took the
transmuter. That was a capital crime in Askone. But at any time he could say that he had lured
me on into a trap with the purest of patriotic motives, and denounce me as a seller of forbidden
things."
"That was obvious."
"Sure, but word against simple word wasn't all there was to it. You see, Pherl had never heard
nor conceived of a microfilm-recorder."
Gorov laughed suddenly.
"That's right," said Ponyets. "He had the upper hand. I was properly chastened. But when I set
up the transmuter for him in my whipped-dog fashion, I incorporated the recorder into the
device and removed it in the next day's overhaul. I had a perfect record of his sanctum
sanctorum, his holy-of-holies, with he himself, poor Pherl, operating the transmuter for all the
ergs it had and crowing over his first piece of gold as if it were an egg he had just laid."
"You showed him the results?"
"Two days later. The poor sap had never seen three-dimensional color-sound images in his life.
He claims he isn't superstitious, but if I ever saw an adult look as scared as he did then, call me
rookie. When I told him I had a recorder planted in the city square, set to go off at midday with a
million fanatical Askonians to watch, and to tear him to pieces subsequently, he was gibbering
at my knees in half a second. He was ready to make any deal I wanted."
"Did you?" Gorov's voice was suppressing laughter. "I mean, have one planted in the city
square."
"No, but that didn't matter. He made the deal. He bought every gadget I had, and every one you
had for as much tin as we could carry. At that moment, he believed me capable of anything.
The agreement is in writing and you'll have a copy before I go down with him, just as another
precaution."
"But you've damaged his ego," said Gorov. "Will he use the gadgets?"
"Why not? It's his only way of recouping his losses, and if he makes money out of it, he'll salve
his pride. And he will be the next Grand Master - and the best man we could have in our favor."
"Yes," said Gorov, "it was a good sale. Yet you've certainly got an uncomfortable sales
technique. No wonder you were kicked out of a seminary. Have you no sense of morals?"
"What are the odds?" said Ponyets, indifferently. "You know what Salvor Hardin said about a
sense of morals."
PART V
THE MERCHANT PRINCES
i.
TRADERS-... With psychohistoric inevitability, economic control of the Foundation grew. The
traders grew rich; and with riches came power....
It is sometimes forgotten that Hober Mallow began life as an ordinary trader. It is never
forgotten that he ended it as the first of the Merchant Princes....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Jorane Sutt put the tips of carefully-manicured fingers together and said, "It's something of a
puzzle. In fact - and this is in the strictest of confidence - it may be another one of Hari
Seldon's crises."
The man opposite felt in the pocket of his short Smyrnian jacket for a cigarette. "Don't know
about that, Sutt. As a general rule, politicians start shouting 'Seldon crisis' at every mayoralty
campaign."
Sutt smiled very faintly, "I'm not campaigning, Mallow. We're facing nuclear weapons, and we
don't know where they're coming from."
Hober Mallow of Smyrno, Master Trader, smoked quietly, almost indifferently. "Go on. If you
have more to say, get it out." Mallow never made the mistake of being overpolite to a
Foundation man. He might be an Outlander, but a man's a man for a’ that.
Sutt indicated the trimensional star-map on the table. He adjusted the controls and a cluster of
some half-dozen stellar systems blazed red.
'That," he said quietly, "is the Korellian Republic."
The trader nodded, "I've been there. Stinking rathole! I suppose you can call it a republic but it's
always someone out of the Argo family that gets elected Commdor each time. And if you ever
don't like it - things happen to you." He twisted his lip and repeated, "I've been there."
"But you've come back, which hasn't always happened. Three trade ships, inviolate under the
Conventions, have disappeared within the territory of the Republic in the last year. And those
ships were armed with all the usual nuclear explosives and force-field defenses."
"What was the last word heard from the ships?"
"Routine reports. Nothing else."
"What did Korell say?"
Sutt's eyes gleamed sardonically, "There was no way of asking. The Foundation's greatest
asset throughout the Periphery is its reputation of power. Do you think we can lose three ships
and ask for them?"
"Well, then, suppose you tell me what you want with me."
Jorane Sutt did not waste his time in the luxury of annoyance. As secretary to the mayor, he
had held off opposition councilmen, jobseekers, reformers, and crackpots who claimed to have
solved in its entirety the course of future history as worked out by Hari Seldon. With training like
that, it took a good deal to disturb him.
He said methodically, "In a moment. You see, three ships lost in the same sector in the same
year can't be accident, and nuclear power can be conquered only by more nuclear power. The
question automatically arises: if Korell has nuclear weapons, where is it getting them?"
And where does it?
"Two alternatives. Either the Korellians have constructed them themselves-"
"Far-fetched!"
"Very! But the other possibility is that we are being afflicted with a case of treason."
"You think so?" Mallow's voice was cold.
The secretary said calmly, "There's nothing miraculous about the possibility. Since the Four
Kingdoms accepted the Foundation Convention, we have had to deal with considerable groups
of dissident populations in each nation. Each former kingdom has its pretenders and its former
noblemen, who can't very well pretend to love the Foundation. Some of them are becoming
active, perhaps."
Mallow was a dull red. "I see. Is there anything you want to say to me? I'm a Smyrnian."
"I know. You're a Smyrnian - born in Smyrno, one of the former Four Kingdoms. You're a
Foundation man by education only. By birth, you're an Outlander and a foreigner. No doubt
your grandfather was a baron at the time of the wars with Anacreon and Loris, and no doubt
your family estates were taken away when Sef Sermak redistributed the land."
"No, by Black Space, no! My grandfather was a blood-poor son-of-a-spacer who died heaving
coal at starving wages before the Foundation took over. I owe nothing to the old regime. But I
was born in Smyrno, and I'm not ashamed of either Smyrno or Smyrnians, by the Galaxy. Your
sly little hints of treason aren't going to panic me into licking Foundation spittle. And now you
can either give your orders or make your accusations. I don't care which."
"My good Master Trader, I don't care an electron whether your grandfather was King of Smyrno
or the greatest pauper on the planet. I recited that rigmarole about your birth and ancestry to
show you that I'm not interested in them. Evidently, you missed the point. Let's go back now.
You're a Smyrnian. You know the Outlanders. Also, you're a trader and one of the best. You've
been to Korell and you know the Korellians. That's where you've got to go."
Mallow breathed deeply, "As a spy?"
"Not at all. As a trader - but with your eyes open. If you can find out where the power is coming
from - I might remind you, since you're a Smyrnian, that two of those lost trade ships had
Smyrnian crews."
"When do I start?"
"When will your ship be ready?"
"In six days."
"Then that's when you start. You'll have all the details at the Admiralty."
"Right!" The trader rose, shook hands roughly, and strode out.
Sutt waited, spreading his fingers gingerly and rubbing out the pressure; then shrugged his
shoulders and stepped into the mayor's office.
The mayor deadened the visiplate and leaned back. "What do you make of it, Sutt?"
"He could be a good actor," said Sutt, and stared thoughtfully ahead.
2 .
It was evening of the same day, and in Jorane Sutt's bachelor apartment on the twenty-first
floor of the Hardin Building, Publis Manlio was sipping wine slowly.
It was Publis Manlio in whose slight, aging body were fulfilled two great offices of the
Foundation. He was Foreign Secretary in the mayor's cabinet, and to all the outer suns, barring
only the Foundation itself, he was, in addition, Primate of the Church, Purveyor of the Holy
Food, Master of the Temples, and so forth almost indefinitely in confusing but sonorous
syllables.
He was saying, "But he agreed to let you send out that trader. It is a point."
"But such a small one," said Sutt. "It gets us nothing immediately. The whole business is the
crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying
out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose."
"True. And this Mallow is a capable man. What if he is not an easy prey to dupery?"
"That is a chance that must be run. If there is treachery, it is the capable men that are
implicated. If not, we need a capable man to detect the truth. And Mallow will be guarded. Your
glass is empty."
"No, thanks. I've had enough."
Sutt filled his own glass and patiently endured the other's uneasy reverie.
Of whatever the reverie consisted, it ended indecisively, for the primate said suddenly, almost
explosively, "Sutt, what's on your mind?"
"I'll tell you, Manlio." His thin lips parted, "We're in the middle of a Seldon crisis."
Manlio stared, then said softly, "How do you know? Has Seldon appeared in the Time Vault
again?"
"That much, my friend, is not necessary. Look, reason it out. Since the Galactic Empire
abandoned the Periphery, and threw us on our own, we have never had an opponent who
possessed nuclear power. Now, for the first time, we have one. That seems significant even if it
stood by itself. And it doesn't. For the first time in over seventy years, we are facing a major
domestic political crisis. I should think the synchronization of the two crises, inner and outer,
puts it beyond all doubt."
Manlio's eyes narrowed, "If that's all, it's not enough. There have been two Seldon crises so far,
and both times the Foundation was in danger of extermination. Nothing can be a third crisis till
that danger returns."
Sutt never showed impatience, "That danger is coming. Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives.
The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo. Look, Manlio, we're proceeding along a
planned history. We know that Hari Seldon worked out the historical probabilities of the future.
We know that some day we're to rebuild the Galactic Empire. We know that it will take a
thousand years or thereabouts. And we know that in the interval we will face certain definite
crises.
"Now the first crisis came fifty years after the establishment of the Foundation, and the second,
thirty years later than that. Almost seventy-five years have gone since. It's time, Manlio, it's
time."
Manlio rubbed his nose uncertainly, "And you've made your plans to meet this crisis?"
Sutt nodded.
"And I," continued Manlio, "am to play a part in it?"
Sutt nodded again, "Before we can meet the foreign threat of atomic power, we've got to put
our own house in order. These traders-"
"Ah!" The primate stiffened, and his eyes grew sharp.
"That's right. These traders. They are useful, but they are too strong - and too uncontrolled.
They are Outlanders, educated apart from religion. On the one hand, we put knowledge into
their hands, and on the other, we remove our strongest hold upon them."
"If we can prove treachery?"
"If we could, direct action would be simple and sufficient. But that doesn't signify in the least.
Even if treason among them did not exist, they would form an uncertain element in our society.
They wouldn't be bound to us by patriotism or common descent, or even by religious awe.
Under their secular leadership, the outer provinces, which, since Hardin's time, look to us as
the Holy Planet, might break away."
"I see all that, but the cure-"
"The cure must come quickly, before the Seldon Crisis becomes acute. If nuclear weapons are
without and disaffection within, the odds might be too great." Sutt put down the empty glass he
had been fingering, "This is obviously your job."
"Mine?"
"I can't do it. My office is appointive and has no legislative standing."
"The mayor-"
"Impossible. His personality is entirely negative. He is energetic only in evading responsibility.
But if an independent party arose that might endanger re-election, he might allow himself to be
led."
"But, Sutt, I lack the aptitude for practical politics."
"Leave that to me. Who knows, Manlio? Since Salvor Hardin's time, the primacy and the
mayoralty have never been combined in a single person. But it might happen now - if your job
were well done."
3 .
And at the other end of town, in homelier surroundings, Hober Mallow kept a second
appointment. He had listened long, and now he said cautiously, "Yes, I've heard of your
campaigns to get trader representation in the council. But why me, Twer?"
Jaim Twer, who would remind you any time, asked or unasked, that he was in the first group of
Outlanders to receive a lay education at the Foundation, beamed.
"I know what I'm doing," he said. "Remember when I met you first, last year."
"At the Trader's Convention."
"Right. You ran the meeting. You had those red-necked oxen planted in their seats, then put
them in your shirtpocket and walked off with them. And you're all right with the Foundation
masses, too. You've got glamor- or, at any rate, solid adventure-publicity, which is the same
thing."
"Very good," said Mallow, dryly. "But why now?"
'Because now's our chance. Do you know that the Secretary of Education has handed in his
resignation? It's not out in the open yet, but it will be."
"How do you know?"
"That - never mind-" He waved a disgusted hand. "It's so. The Actionist party is splitting wide
open, and we can murder it right now on a straight question of equal rights for traders; or,
rather, democracy, pro- and anti-."
Mallow lounged back in his chair and stared at his thick fingers, "Uh-uh. Sorry, Twer. I'm
leaving next week on business. You'll have to get someone else."
Twer stared, "Business? What kind of business?"
"Very super-secret. Triple-A priority. All that, you know. Had a talk with the mayor's own
secretary."
"Snake Sutt?" Jaim Twer grew excited. "A trick. The son-of-a-spacer is getting rid of you.
Mallow-"
"Hold on!" Mallow's hand fell on the other's balled fist. "Don't go into a blaze. If it's a trick, I'll be
back some day for the reckoning, if it isn't, your snake, Sutt, is playing into our hands. Listen,
there's a Seldon crisis coming up."
Mallow waited for a reaction but it never came. Twer merely stared. "What's a Seldon crisis?"
"Galaxy!" Mallow exploded angrily at the anticlimax, "What the blue blazes did you do when you
went to school? What do you mean anyway by a fool question like that?"
The elder man frowned, "If you'll explain-"
There was a long pause, then, "I'll explain." Mallow's eyebrows lowered, and he spoke slowly.
"When the Galactic Empire began to die at the edges, and when the ends of the Galaxy
reverted to barbarism and dropped away, Hari Seldon and his band of psychologists planted a
colony, the Foundation, out here in the middle of the mess, so that we could incubate art,
science, and technology, and form the nucleus of the Second Empire."
"Oh, yes, yes-"
"I'm not finished," said the trader, coldly. "The future course of the Foundation was plotted
according to the science of psychohistory, then highly developed, and conditions arranged so
as to bring about a series of crises that will force us most rapidly along the route to future
Empire. Each crisis, each Seldon crisis, marks an epoch in our history. We're approaching one
now - our third."
Twer shrugged. "I suppose this was mentioned in school, but I've been out of school a long
time - longer than you."
"I suppose so. Forget it. What matters is that I'm being sent out into the middle of the
development of this crisis. There's no telling what I'll have when I come back, and there is a
council election every year."
Twer looked up, "Are you on the track of anything?"
"No."
"You have definite plans?"
"Not the faintest inkling of one."
"Well-"
"Well, nothing. Hardin once said: 'To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must
improvise as well.' I'll improvise."
Twer shook his head uncertainly, and they stood, looking at each other.
Mallow said, quite suddenly, but quite matter-of-factly, "I tell you what, how about coming with
me? Don't stare, man. You've been a trader before you decided them was more excitement in
politics. Or so I've heard."
"Where are you going? Tell me that."
Towards the Whassallian Rift. I can't be more specific till we're out in space. What do you say?"
Suppose Sutt decides he wants me where he can see
"Not likely. If he's anxious to get rid of me, why not of you as well? Besides which, no trader
would hit space if he couldn't pick his own crew. I take whom I please."
There was a queer glint in the older man's eyes, "All right. I'll go." He held out his hand, "It'll be
my first trip in three years."
Mallow grasped and shook the other's hand, "Good! All fired good! And now I've got to round
up the boys. You know where the Far Star docks, don 't you? Then show up tomorrow.
Good-by."
4 .
Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history: the republic whose ruler has every attribute of
the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained
even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal "honor" and court
etiquette.
Materially, its prosperity was low. The day of the Galactic Empire had departed, with nothing
but silent memorials and broken structures to testify to it. The day of the Foundation had not yet
come - and in the fierce determination of its ruler, the Commdor Asper Argo, with his strict
regulation of the traders and his stricter prohibition of the missionaries, it was never coming.
The spaceport itself was decrepit and decayed, and the crew of the Far Star were drearily
aware of that. The moldering hangars made for a moldering atmosphere and Jaim Twer itched
and fretted over a game of solitaire.
Hober Mallow said thoughtfully, "Good trading material here." He was staring quietly out the
viewport. So far, there was little else to be said about Korell. The trip here was uneventful. The
squadron of Korellian ships that had shot out to intercept the Far Star had been tiny, limping
relics of ancient glory or battered, clumsy hulks. They had maintained their distance fearfully,
and still maintained it, and for a week now, Mallow's requests for an audience with the local go
government had been unanswered.
Mallow repeated, "Good trading here. You might call this virgin territory."
Jaim Twer looked up impatiently, and threw his cards aside, "What the devil do you intend
doing, Mallow? The crew's grumbling, the officers are worried, and I’m wondering-"
"Wondering? About what?"
"About the situation. And about you. What are we doing?"
"Waiting."
The old trader snorted and grew red. He growled, "You're going it blind, Mallow. There's a
guard around the field and there are ships overhead. Suppose they're getting ready to blow us
into a hole in the ground."
"They've had a week."
"Maybe they're waiting for reinforcements." Twer's eyes were sharp and hard.
Mallow sat down abruptly, "Yes, I'd thought of that You see, it poses a pretty problem. First, we
got here without trouble. That may mean nothing, however, for only three ships out of better
than three hundred went a-glimmer last year. The percentage is low. But that may mean also
that the number of their ships equipped with nuclear power is small, and that they dare not
expose them needlessly, until that number grows.
"But it could mean, on the other hand, that they haven't nuclear power after all. Or maybe they
have and are keeping undercover, for fear we know something. It's one thing, after all, to
piratize blundering, light-armed merchant ships. It's another to fool around with an accredited
envoy of the Foundation when the mere fact of his presence may mean the Foundation is
growing suspicious.
"Combine this-"
"Flold on, Mallow, hold on." Twer raised his hands. "You're just about drowning me with talk.
What're you getting at? Never mind the in-betweens."
"You've got to have the in-betweens, or you won't understand, Twer. We're both waiting. They
don't know what I'm doing here and I don't know what they've got here. But I'm in the weaker
position because I'm one and they're an entire world - maybe with atomic power. I can't afford
to be the one to weaken. Sure it's dangerous. Sure there may be a hole in the ground waiting
for us. But we knew that from the start. What else is there to do?"
"I don't- Who's that, now?"
Mallow looked up patiently, and tuned the receiver. The visiplate glowed into the craggy face of
the watch sergeant.
"Speak, sergeant."
The sergeant said, "Pardon, sir. The men have given entry to a Foundation missionary."
"A what?' Mallow's face grew livid.
"A missionary, sit. Fle's in need of hospitalization, sir-"
"There'll be more than one in need of that, sergeant, for this piece of work. Order the men to
battle stations."
Crew's lounge was almost empty. Five minutes after the order, even the men on the off-shift
were at their guns. It was speed that was the great virtue in the anarchic regions of the
interstellar space of the Periphery, and it was in speed above all that the crew of a master
trader excelled.
Mallow entered slowly, and stared the missionary up and down and around. His eye slid to
Lieutenant Tinter, who shifted uneasily to one side and to Watch-Sergeant Demen, whose
blank face and stolid figure flanked the other.
The Master Trader turned to Twer and paused thoughtfully, "Well, then, Twer, get the officers
here quietly, except for the co-ordinators and the trajectorian. The men are to remain at stations
till further orders."
There was a five-minute hiatus, in which Mallow kicked open the doors to the lavatories, looked
behind the bar, pulled the draperies across the thick windows. For half a minute he left the
room altogether, and when he returned he was humming abstractedly.
Men filed in. Twer followed, and closed the door silently.
Mallow said quietly, "First, who let this man in without orders from me?"
The watch sergeant stepped forward. Every eye shifted. "Pardon, sir. It was no definite person.
It was a sort of mutual agreement. Fie was one of us, you might say, and these foreigners
here-"
Mallow cut him short, "I sympathize with your feelings, sergeant, and understand them. These
men, were they under your command?"
"Yes, sir."
"When this is over, they're to be confined to individual quarters for a week. You yourself are
relieved of all supervisory duties for a similar period. Understood?"
The sergeant's face never changed, but there was the slightest droop to his shoulders. Fie said,
crisply, "Yes, sir."
"You may leave. Get to your gun-station."
The door closed behind him and the babble rose.
Twer broke in, "Why the punishment, Mallow? You know that these Korellians kill captured
missionaries."
"An action against my orders is bad in itself whatever other reasons there may be in its favor.
No one was to leave or enter the ship without permission."
Lieutenant Tinter murmured rebelliously, "Seven days without action. You can't maintain
discipline that way."
Mallow said icily, "/can. There's no merit in discipline under ideal circumstances. I'll have it in
the face of death, or it's useless. Where's this missionary? Get him here in front of me."
The trader sat down, while the scarlet-cloaked figure was carefully brought forward.
"What's your name, reverend?"
"Eh?" The scarlet-robed figure wheeled towards Mallow, the whole body turning as a unit. FHis
eyes were blankly open and there was a bruise on one temple. Fie had not spoken, nor, as far
as Mallow could tell, moved during all the previous interval.
"Your name, revered one?"
The missionary started to sudden feverish life. FHis arms went out in an embracing gesture. "My
son - my children. May you always be in the protecting arms of the Galactic Spirit."
Twer stepped forward, eyes troubled, voice husky, "The man's sick. Take him to bed,
somebody. Order him to bed, Mallow, and have him seen to. He's badly hurt."
Mallow's great arm shoved him back, "Don't interfere, Twer, or I'll have you out of the room.
Your name, revered one?"
The missionary's hands clasped in sudden supplication, "As you are enlightened men, save me
from the heathen." The words tumbled out, "Save me from these brutes and darkened ones
who raven after me and would afflict the Galactic Spirit with their crimes. I am Jord Parma, of
the Anacreonian worlds. Educated at the Foundation; the Foundation itself, my children. I am a
Priest of the Spirit educated into all the mysteries, who have come here where the inner voice
called me." He was gasping. "I have suffered at the hands of the unenlightened. As you are
Children of the Spirit; and in the name of that Spirit, protect me from them."
A voice broke in upon them, as the emergency alarm box clamored metallically:
"Enemy units in sight! Instruction desired!"
Every eye shot mechanically upward to the speaker.
Mallow swore violently. He clicked open the reverse and yelled, "Maintain vigil! That is all!" and
turned it off.
He made his way to the thick drapes that rustled aside at a touch and stared grimly out,
Enemy units! Several thousands of them in the persons of the individual members of a
Korellian mob. The rolling rabble encompassed the port from extreme end to extreme end, and
in the cold, hard light of magnesium flares the foremost straggled closer.
"Tinter!" The trader never turned, but the back of his neck was red. "Get the outer speaker
working and find out what they want. Ask if they have a representative of the law with them.
Make no promises and no threats, or I'll kill you."
Tinter turned and left.
Mallow felt a rough hand on his shoulder and he struck it aside. It was Twer. His voice was an
angry hiss in his ear, "Mallow, you're bound to hold onto this man. There's no way of
maintaining decency and honor otherwise. He's of the Foundation and, after all, he - is a priest.
These savages outside- Do you hear me?"
"I hear you, Twer." Mallow's voice was incisive. "I've got more to do here than guard
missionaries. I'll do, sir, what I please, and, by Seldon and all the Galaxy, if you try to stop me,
I'll tear out your stinking windpipe. Don't get in my way, Twer, or it will be the last of you."
He turned and strode past. "You! Revered Parma! Did you know that, by convention, no
Foundation missionaries may enter the Korellian territory?"
The missionary was trembling, "I can but go where the Spirit leads, my son. If the darkened
ones refuse enlightenment, is it not the greater sign of their need for it?"
"That's outside the question, revered one. You are here against the law of both Korell and the
Foundation. I cannot in law protect you."
The missionary's hands were raised again. His earlier bewilderment was gone. There was the
raucous clamor of the ship's outer communication system in action, and the faint, undulating
gabble of the angry horde in response. The sound made his eyes wild.
"You hear them? Why do you talk of law to me, of a law made by men? There are higher laws.
Was it not the Galactic Spirit that said: Thou shalt not stand idly by to the hurl of thy fellowman.
And has he not said: Even as thou dealest with the humble and defenseless, thus shalt thou be
dealt with.
"Have you not guns? Have you not a ship? And behind you is there not the Foundation? And
above and all-about you is there not the Spirit that rules the universe?" He paused for breath.
And then the great outer voice of the Far Star ceased and Lieutenant Tinter was back, troubled.
"Speak!" said Mallow, shortly.
"Sir, they demand the person of Jord Parma."
"If not?"
"There are various threats, sir. It is difficult to make much out. There are so many - and they
seem quite mad. There is someone who says he governs the district and has police powers,
but he is quite evidently not his own master."
"Master or not," shrugged Mallow, "he is the law. Tell them that if this governor, or policeman,
or whatever he is, approaches the ship alone, he can have the Revered Jord Parma."
And there was suddenly a gun in his hand. He added, "I don't know what insubordination is. I
have never had any experience with it. But if there's anyone here who thinks he can teach me,
I'd like to teach him my antidote in return."
The gun swiveled slowly, and rested on Twer. With an effort, the old trader's face untwisted and
his hands unclenched and lowered. His breath was a harsh rasp in his nostrils.
Tinter left, and in five minutes a puny figure detached itself from the crowd. It approached
slowly and hesitantly, plainly drenched in fear and apprehension. Twice it turned back, and
twice the patently obvious threats of the many-headed monster urged him on.
"All right," Mallow gestured with the hand-blaster, which remained unsheathed. "Grun and
Upshur, take him out."
The missionary screeched. He raised his arms and rigid fingers speared upward as the
voluminous sleeves fell away to reveal the thin, veined arms. There was a momentary, tiny
flash of light that came and went in a breath. Mallow blinked and gestured again,
contemptuously.
The missionary's voice poured out as he struggled in the two-fold grasp, "Cursed be the traitor
who abandons his fellowman to evil and to death. Deafened be the ears that are deaf to the
pleadings of the helpless. Blind be the eyes that are blind to innocence. Blackened forever be
the soul that consorts with blackness-"
Twer clamped his hands tightly over his ears.
Mallow flipped his blaster and put it away. "Disperse," he said, evenly, "to respective stations.
Maintain full vigil for six hours after dispersion of crowd. Double stations for forty-eight hours
thereafter. Further instructions at that time. Twer, come with me."
They were alone in Mallow's private quarters. Mallow indicated a chair and Twer sat down. His
stocky figure looked shrunken.
Mallow stared him down, sardonically. "Twer," he said, "I'm disappointed. Your three years in
politics seem to have gotten you out of trader habits. Remember, I may be a democrat back at
the Foundation, but there's nothing short of tyranny that can run my ship the way I want it run. I
never had to pull a blaster on my men before, and I wouldn't have had to now, if you hadn't
gone out of line.
"Twer, you have no official position, but you're here on my invitation, and I'll extend you every
courtesy - in private. However, from now on, in the presence of my officers or men, I'm 'sir,'
and not 'Mallow.' And when I give an order, you'll jump faster than a third-class recruit just for
luck, or I'll have you handcuffed in the sub-level even faster. Understand?"
The party-leader swallowed dryly. He said, reluctantly, "My apologies."
"Accepted! Will you shake?"
Twer's limp fingers were swallowed in Mallow's huge palm. Twer said, "My motives were good.
It's difficult to send a man out to be lynched. That wobbly-kneed governor or whatever-he-was
can't save him. It's murder."
"I can't help that. Frankly, the incident smelled too bad. Didn't you notice?"
"Notice what?"
"This spaceport is deep in the middle of a sleepy far section. Suddenly a missionary escapes.
Where from? He comes here. Coincidence? A huge crowd gathers. From where? The nearest
city of any size must be at least a hundred miles away. But they arrive in half an hour. How?"
"How?" echoed Twer.
"Well, what if the missionary were brought here and released as bait. Our friend, Revered
Parma, was considerably confused. He seemed at no time to be in complete possession of his
wits."
"Hard usage-" murmured Twer bitterly.
"Maybe! And maybe the idea was to have us go all chivalrous and gallant, into a stupid defense
of the man. He was here against the laws of Korell and the Foundation. If I withhold him, it is an
act of war against Korell, and the Foundation would have no legal right to defend us."
"That - that's pretty far-fetched."
The speaker blared and forestalled Mallow's answer: "Sir, official communication received."
"Submit immediately!"
The gleaming cylinder arrived in its slot with a click. Mallow opened it and shook out the
silver-impregnated sheet it held. He rubbed it appreciatively between thumb and finger and
said, "Teleported direct from the capital. Commdor's own stationery."
He read it in a glance and laughed shortly, "So my idea was far-fetched, was it?"
He tossed it to Twer, and added, "Half an hour after we hand back the missionary, we finally
get a very polite invitation to the Commdor's august presence - after seven days of previous
waiting. / think we passed a test."
5 .
Commdor Asper was a man of the people, by self-acclamation. His remaining back-fringe of
gray hair drooped limply to his shoulders, his shirt needed laundering, and he spoke with a
snuffle.
"There is no ostentation here, Trader Mallow," he said. "No false show. In me, you see merely
the first citizen of the state. That's what Commdor means, and that's the only title I have."
He seemed inordinately pleased with it all, "in fact, I consider that fact one of the strongest
bonds between Korell and your nation. I understand you people enjoy the republican blessings
we do."
"Exactly, Commdor," said Mallow gravely, taking mental exception to the comparison, "an
argument which I consider strongly in favor of continued peace and friendship between our
governments."
"Peace! Ah!" The Commdor's sparse gray beard twitched to the sentimental grimaces of his
face. "I don't think there is anyone in the Periphery who has so near his heart the ideal of
Peace, as I have. I can truthfully say that since I succeeded my illustrious father to the
leadership of the state, the reign of Peace has never been broken. Perhaps I shouldn't say it"
-he coughed gently- "but I have been told that my people, my fellow-citizens rather, know me
as Asper, the Well-Beloved."
Mallow's eyes wandered over the well-kept garden. Perhaps the tall men and the
strangely-designed but openly-vicious weapons they carried just happened to be lurking in odd
comers as a precaution against himself. That would be understandable. But the lofty,
steel-girdered walls that circled the place had quite obviously been recently strengthened - an
unfitting occupation for such a Well-Beloved Asper.
He said, "It is fortunate that I have you to deal with then, Commdor. The despots and monarchs
of surrounding worlds, which haven't the benefit of enlightened administration, often lack the
qualities that would make a ruler well-beloved."
Such as?" There was a cautious note in the Commdor's voice.
"Such as a concern for the best interests of their people, You, on the other hand, would
understand,"
The Commdor kept his eyes on the gravel path as they walked leisurely, His hands caressed
each other behind his back.
Mallow went on smoothly, "Up to now, trade between our two nations has suffered because of
the restrictions placed upon our traders by your government. Surely, it has long been evident to
you that unlimited trade-"
"Free Trade!" mumbled the Commdor.
"Free Trade, then. You must see that it would be of benefit to both of us. There are things you
have that we want, and things we have that you want. It asks only an exchange to bring
increased prosperity. An enlightened ruler such as yourself, a friend of the people - I might say,
a member of the people - needs no elaboration on that theme. I won't insult your intelligence by
offering any."
"True! I have seen this. But what would you?" His voice was a plaintive whine. "Your people
have always been so unreasonable. I am in favor of all the trade our economy can support, but
not on your terms. I am not sole master here." His voice rose, "I am only the servant of public
opinion. My people will not take commerce which carries with it a compulsory religion."
Mallow drew himself up, "A compulsory religion?"
"So it has always been in effect. Surely you remember the case of Askone twenty years ago.
First they were sold some of your goods and then your people asked for complete freedom of
missionary effort in order that the goods might be run properly; that Temples of Health be set
up. There was then the establishment of religious schools; autonomous rights for all officers of
the religion and with what result? Askone is now an integral member of the Foundation's
system and the Grand Master cannot call his underwear his own. Oh, no! Oh, no! The dignity of
an independent people could never suffer it."
"None of what you speak is at all what I suggest," interposed Mallow.
"No?"
"No. I'm a Master Trader. Money is my religion. All this mysticism and hocus-pocus of the
missionaries annoy me, and I'm glad you refuse to countenance it. It makes you more my type
of man."
The Commdor's laugh was high-pitched and jerky, "Well said! The Foundation should have
sent a man of your caliber before this."
He laid a friendly hand upon the trader's bulking shoulder, "But man, you have told me only
half. You have told me what the catch is not. Now tell me what it is"
"The only catch, Commdor, is that you're going to be burdened with an immense quantity of
riches."
"Indeed?" he snuffled. "But what could I want with riches? The true wealth is the love of one's
people. I have that."
"You can have both, for it is possible to gather gold with one hand and love with the other."
"Now that, my young man, would be an interesting phenomenon, if it were possible. How would
you go about it?"
"Oh, in a number of ways. The difficulty is choosing among them. Let's see. Well, luxury items,
for instance. This object here, now-"
Mallow drew gently out of an inner pocket a flat, linked chain of polished metal. "This, for
instance."
"What is it?"
"That's got to be demonstrated. Can you get a woman? Any young female will do. And a mirror,
full length."
"Hm-m-m. Let's get indoors, then."
The Commdor referred to his dwelling place as a house. The populace undoubtedly would call
it a palace. To Mallow's straightforward eyes, it looked uncommonly like a fortress, it was built
on an eminence that overlooked the capital. Its walls were thick and reinforced. Its approaches
were guarded, and its architecture was shaped for defense. Just the type of dwelling, Mallow
thought sourly, for Asper, the Well-Beloved.
A young girl was before them. She bent low to the Commdor, who said, "This is one of the
Commdora's girls. Will she do?"
"Perfectly!"
The Commdor watched carefully while Mallow snapped the chain about the girl's waist, and
stepped back.
The Commdor snuffled, "Well. Is that all?"
"Will you draw the curtain, Commdor. Young lady, there's a little knob just near the snap. Will
you move it upward, please? Go ahead, it won't hurt you."
The girl did so, drew a sharp breath, looked at her hands, and gasped, "Oh!"
From her waist as a source she was drowned in a pale, streaming luminescence of shifting
color that drew itself over her head in a flashing coronet of liquid fire. It was as if someone had
tom the aurora borealis out of the sky and molded it into a cloak.
The girl stepped to the mirror and stared, fascinated.
"Here, take this." Mallow handed her a necklace of dull pebbles. "Put it around your neck."
The girl did so, and each pebble, as it entered the luminescent field became an individual flame
that leaped and sparkled in crimson and gold.
"What do you think of it?" Mallow asked her. The girl didn't answer but there was adoration in
her eyes. The Commdor gestured and reluctantly, she pushed the knob down, and the glory
died. She left - with a memory.
"It's yours, Commdor," said Mallow, "for the Commdora. Consider it a small gift from the
Foundation."
"Hm-m-m.' The Commdor turned the belt and necklace over in his hand as though calculating
the weight. "How is it done?"
Mallow shrugged, "That's a question for our technical experts. But it will work for you without -
mark you, without- priestly help."
"Well, it's only feminine frippery after all. What could you do with it? Where would the money
come in?"
"You have balls, receptions, banquets - that sort of thing?"
"Oh, yes."
"Do you realize what women will pay for that sort of jewelry? Ten thousand credits, at least."
The Commdor seemed struck in a heap, "Ah!"
"And since the power unit of this particular item will not last longer than six months, there will be
the necessity of frequent replacements. Now we can sell as many of these as you want for the
equivalent in wrought iron of one thousand credits. There's nine hundred percent profit for you."
The Commdor plucked at his beard and seemed engaged in awesome mental calculations,
"Galaxy, how they would fight for them. I'll keep the supply small and let them bid. Of course, it
wouldn't do to let them know that I personally-"
Mallow said, "We can explain the workings of dummy corporations, if you would like. -Then,
working further at random, take our complete line of household gadgets. We have collapsible
stoves that will roast the toughest meats to the desired tenderness in two minutes. We've got
knives that won't require sharpening. We've got the equivalent of a complete laundry that can
be packed in a small closet and will work entirely automatically. Ditto dish-washers. Ditto-ditto
floor-scrubbers, furniture polishers, dust-precipitators, lighting fixtures - oh, anything you like.
Think of your increased popularity, if you make them available to the public. Think of your
increased quantity of, uh, worldly goods, if they're available as a government monopoly at nine
hundred percent profit. It will be worth many times the money to them, and they needn't know
what you pay for it. And, mind you, none of it will require priestly supervision. Everybody will be
happy."
"Except you, it seems. What do you get out of it?"
"Just what every trader gets by Foundation law. My men and I will collect half of whatever
profits we take in. Just you buy all I want to sell you, and we'll both make out quite well. Quite
well."
The Commdor was enjoying his thoughts, "What did you say you wanted to be paid with? Iron?
"That, and coal, and bauxite. Also tobacco, pepper, magnesium, hardwood. Nothing you
haven't got enough of."
"It sounds well."
"I think so. Oh, and still another item at random, Commdor. I could retool your factories."
"Eh? How's that?"
"Well, take your steel foundries. I have handy little gadgets that could do tricks with steel that
would cut production costs to one percent of previous marks. You could cut prices by half, and
still split extremely fat profits with the manufacturers. I tell you, I could show you exactly what I
mean, if you allowed me a demonstration. Do you have a steel foundry in this city? It wouldn't
take long."
"It could be arranged, Trader Mallow. But tomorrow, tomorrow. Would you dine with us
tonight?"
"My men-" began Mallow.
"Let them all come," said the Commdor, expansively. "A symbolic friendly union of our nations.
It will give us a chance for further friendly discussion. But one thing," his face lengthened and
grew stem, "none of your religion. Don't think that all this is an entering wedge for the
missionaries."
"Commdor," said Mallow, dryly, "I give you my word that religion would cut my profits."
"Then that will do for now. You'll be escorted back to your ship."
6 .
The Commdora was much younger than her husband. Her face was pale and coldly formed
and her black hair was drawn smoothly and tightly back.
Her voice was tart. "You are quite finished, my gracious and noble husband? Quite, quite
finished? I suppose I may even enter the garden if I wish, now."
"There is no need for dramatics, Licia, my dear," said the Commdor, mildly. "The young man
will attend at dinner tonight, and you can speak with him all you wish and even amuse yourself
by listening to all I say. Room will have to be arranged for his men somewhere about the place.
The stars grant that they be few in numbers."
"Most likely they'll be great hogs of eaters who will eat meat by the quarter-animal and wine by
the hogshead. And you will groan for two nights when you calculate the expense."
"Well now, perhaps I won't. Despite your opinion, the dinner is to be on the most lavish scale."
"Oh, I see." She stared at him contemptuously. "You are very friendly with these barbarians.
Perhaps that is why I was not to be permitted to attend your conversation. Perhaps your little
weazened soul is plotting to turn against my father."
"Not at all."
"Yes, I'd be likely to believe you, wouldn't I? If ever a poor woman was sacrificed for policy to
an unsavory marriage, it was myself. I could have picked a more proper man from the alleys
and mudheaps of my native world."
"Well, now, I'll tell you what, my lady. Perhaps you would enjoy returning to your native world.
Except that, to retain as a souvenir that portion of you with which I am best acquainted, I could
have your tongue cut out first. And," he tolled his head, calculatingly, to one side, "as a final
improving touch to your beauty, your ears and the tip of your nose as well."
"You wouldn't dare, you little pug-dog. My father would pulverize your toy nation to meteoric
dust. In fact, he might do it in any case, if I told him you were treating with these barbarians."
"Hm-m-m. Well, there's no need for threats. You are free to question the man yourself tonight.
Meanwhile, madam, keep your wagging tongue still."
"At your orders?"
"Here, take this, then, and keep still."
The band was about her waist and the necklace around her neck. He pushed the knob himself
and stepped back.
The Commdora drew in her breath and held out her hands stiffly. She fingered the necklace
gingerly, and gasped again.
The Commdor rubbed his hands with satisfaction and said, "You may wear it tonight - and I'll
get you more. Now keep still."
The Commdora kept still.
7 .
Jaim Twer fidgeted and shuffled his feet. He said, "What's twisting yoi/rface?"
Hober Mallow lifted out of his brooding, "Is my face twisted? It's not meant so."
"Something must have happened yesterday, -I mean, besides that feast." With sudden
conviction, "Mallow, there's trouble, isn't there?"
"Trouble? No. Quite the opposite. In fact, I'm in the position of throwing my full weight against a
door and finding it ajar at the time. We're getting into this steel foundry too easily."
"You suspect a trap?"
"Oh, for Seldon's sake, don't be melodramatic." Mallow swallowed his impatience and added
conversationally, "It's just that the easy entrance means there will be nothing to see.
"Nuclear power, huh?" Twer ruminated. "I'll tell you. There's just about no evidence of any
nuclear power economy here in Korell. And it would be pretty hard to mask all signs of the
widespread effects a fundamental technology such as nucleics would have on everything."
"Not if it was just starting up, Twer, and being applied to a war economy. You'd find it in the
shipyards and the steel foundries only."
"So if we don't find it, then-"
"Then they haven't got it - or they're not showing it. Toss a coin or take a guess."
Twer shook his head, "I wish I'd been with you yesterday."
"I wish you had, too," said Mallow stonily. "I have no objection to moral support. Unfortunately,
it was the Commdor who set the terms of the meeting, and not myself. And what is coming now
would seem to be the royal groundcar to escort us to the foundry. Have you got the gadgets?"
"All of them."
8 .
The foundry was large, and bore the odor of decay which no amount of superficial repairs could
quite erase. It was empty now and in quite an unnatural state of quiet, as it played
unaccustomed host to the Commdor and his court.
Mallow had swung the steel sheet onto the two supports with a careless heave. He had taken
the instrument held out to him by Twer and was gripping the leather handle inside its leaden
sheath.
"The instrument," he said, "is dangerous, but so is a buzz saw. You just have to keep your
fingers away."
And as he spoke, he drew the muzzle-slit swiftly down the length of the steel sheet, which
quietly and instantly fell in two.
There was a unanimous jump, and Mallow laughed. He picked up one of the halves and
propped it against his knee, "You can adjust the cutting-length accurately to a hundredth of an
inch, and a two-inch sheet will slit down the middle as easily as this thing did. If you've got the
thickness exactly judged, you can place steel on a wooden table, and split the metal without
scratching the wood."
And at each phrase, the nuclear shear moved and a gouged chunk of steel flew across the
room.
"That," he said, "is whittling - with steel."
He passed back the shear. "Or else you have the plane. Do you want to decrease the thickness
of a sheet, smooth out an irregularity, remove corrosion? Watch!"
Thin, transparent foil flew off the other half of the original sheet in six-inch swarths, then
eight-inch, then twelve.
"Or drills? It's all the same principle."
They were crowded around now. It might have been a sleight-of-hand show, a comer magician,
a vaudeville act made into high-pressure salesmanship. Commdor Asper fingered scraps of
steel. High officials of the government tiptoed over each other's shoulders, and whispered,
while Mallow punched clean, beautiful round holes through an inch of hard steel at every touch
of his nuclear drill.
"Just one more demonstration. Bring two short lengths of pipe, somebody."
An Honorable Chamberlain of something-or-other sprang to obedience in the general
excitement and thought-absorption, and stained his hands like any laborer.
Mallow stood them upright and shaved the ends off with a single stroke of the shear, and then
joined the pipes, fresh cut to fresh cut.
And there was a single pipe! The new ends, with even atomic irregularities missing, formed one
piece upon joining.
Then Mallow looked up at his audience, stumbled at his first word and stopped. There was the
keen stirring of excitement in his chest, and the base of his stomach went tingly and cold.
The Commdor's own bodyguard, in the confusion, had struggled to the front line, and Mallow,
for the first time, was near enough to see their unfamiliar hand-weapons in detail.
They were nuclear! There was no mistaking it; an explosive projectile weapon with a barrel like
that was impossible. But that wasn't the big point. That wasn't the point at all.
The butts of those weapons had, deeply etched upon them, in worn gold plating, the
Spaceship-and-Sun!
The same Spaceship-and-Sun that was stamped on every, one of the great volumes of the
original Encyclopedia that the Foundation had begun and not yet finished. The same
Spaceship-and-Sun that had blazoned the banner of the Galactic Empire through millennia.
Mallow talked through and around his thoughts, "Test that pipe! It's one piece. Not perfect;
naturally, the joining shouldn't be done by hand."
There was no need of further legerdemain. It had gone over. Mallow was through. He had what
he wanted. There was only one thing in his mind. The golden globe with its conventionalized
rays, and the oblique cigar shape that was a space vessel.
The Spaceship-and-Sun of the Empire!
The Empire! The words drilled! A century and a half had passed but there was still the-Empire,
somewhere deeper in the Galaxy. And it was emerging again, out into the Periphery.
Mallow smiled!
9 .
The Far Star was two days out in space, when Hober Mallow, in his private quarters with Senior
Lieutenant Drawt, handed him an envelope, a roll of microfilm, and a silvery spheroid.
"As of an hour from now, Lieutenant, you're Acting Captain of the Far Star, until I return, -or
forever."
Drawt made a motion of standing but Mallow waved him down imperiously.
"Quiet, and listen. The envelope contains the exact location of the planet to which you're to
proceed. There you will wait for me for two months. If, before the two months are up, the
Foundation locates you, the microfilm is my report of the trip.
"If, however," and his voice was somber, "I do not return at the end of two months, and
Foundation vessels do not locate you, proceed to the planet, Terminus, and hand in the Time
Capsule as the report. Do you understand that?"
"Yes, sir."
"At no time are you, or any of the men, to amplify in any single instance, my official report."
"If we are questioned, sir?"
"Then you know nothing."
"Yes, sir."
The interview ended, and fifty minutes later, a lifeboat kicked lightly off the side of the Far Star.
10 .
Onum Barr was an old man, too old to be afraid. Since the last disturbances, he had lived alone
on the fringes of the land with what books he had saved from the ruins. Fie had nothing he
feared losing, least of all the worn remnant of his life, and so he faced the intruder without
cringing.
"Your door was open," the stranger explained.
His accent was clipped and harsh, and Barr did not fail to notice the strange blue-steel
hand-weapon at his hip. In the half gloom of the small room, Barr saw the glow of a force-shield
surrounding the man.
He said, wearily, "There is no reason to keep it closed. Do you wish anything of me?"
"Yes." The stranger remained standing in the center of the room. He was large, both in height
and bulk. "Yours is the only house about here."
"It is a desolate place," agreed Barr, "but there is a town to the east. I can show you the way'."
"In awhile. May I sit?"
"If the chairs will hold you," said the old man, gravely. They were old, too. Relics of a better
youth.
The stranger said, "My name is Hober Mallow. I come from a far province."
Barr nodded and smiled, "Your tongue convicted you of that long ago. I am Onum Barr of
Siwenna - and once Patrician of the Empire."
"Then this is Siwenna. I had only old maps to guide me."
"They would have to be old, indeed, for star-positions to be misplaced."
Barr sat quite still, while the other's eyes drifted away into a reverie. He noticed that the nuclear
force-shield had vanished from about the man and admitted dryly to himself that his person no
longer seemed formidable to strangers - or even, for good or for evil, to his enemies.
He said, "My house is poor and my resources few. You may share what I have if your stomach
can endure black bread and dried corn."
Mallow shook his head, "No, I have eaten, and I can't stay. All I need are the directions to the
center of government."
"That is easily enough done, and poor though I am, deprives me of nothing. Do you mean the
capital of the planet, or of the Imperial Sector?"
The younger man's eyes narrowed, "Aren't the two identical? Isn't this Siwenna?"
The old patrician nodded slowly, "Siwenna, yes. But Siwenna is no longer capital of the
Normannic Sector. Your old map has misled you after all. The stars may not change even in
centuries, but political boundaries are all too fluid."
"That's too bad. In fact, that's very bad. Is the new capital far off?"
"It's on Orsha II. Twenty parsecs off. Your map will direct you. How old is it?"
"A hundred and fifty years."
"That old?" The old man sighed. "History has been crowded since. Do you know any of it?"
Mallow shook his bead slowly.
Barr said, "You're fortunate. It has been an evil time for the provinces, but for the reign of
Stannell VI, and he died fifty years ago. Since that time, rebellion and ruin, ruin and rebellion."
Barr wondered if he were growing garrulous. It was a lonely life out here, and he had so little
chance to talk to men.
Mallow said with sudden sharpness, "Ruin, eh? You sound as if the province were
impoverished."
"Perhaps not on an absolute scale. The physical resources of twenty-five first-rank planets take
a long time to use up. Compared to the wealth of the last century, though, we have gone a long
way downhill - and there is no sign of turning, not yet. Why are you so interested in all this,
young man? You are all alive and your eyes shine!"
The trader came near enough to blushing, as the faded eyes seemed to look too deep into his
and smile at what they saw.
He said, "Now look here. I'm a trader out there - out toward the rim of the Galaxy. I've located
some old maps, and I'm out to open new markets. Naturally, talk of impoverished provinces
disturbs me. You can't get money out of a world unless money's there to be got. Now how's
Siwenna, for instance?"
The old man leaned forward, "I cannot say. It will do even yet, perhaps. But you a trader? You
look more like a fighting man. You hold your hand near your gun and there is a scar on your
jawbone."
Mallow jerked his head, "There isn't much law out there where I come from. Fighting and scars
are part of a trader's overhead. But fighting is only useful when there's money at the end, and if
I can get it without, so much the sweeter. Now will I find enough money here to make it worth
the fighting? I take it I can find the fighting easily enough."
"Easily enough," agreed Barr. "You could join Wiscard's remnants in the Red Stars. I don't
know, though, if you'd call that fighting or piracy. Or you could join our present gracious viceroy
- gracious by right of murder, pillage, rapine, and the word of a boy Emperor, since rightfully
assassinated." The patrician's thin cheeks reddened. His eyes closed and then opened,
bird-bright.
"You don't sound very friendly to the viceroy, Patrician Barr," said Mallow. "What if I'm one of
his spies?"
"What if you are?" said Barr, bitterly. "What can you take?" He gestured a withered arm at the
bare interior of the decaying mansion.
"Your life."
"It would leave me easily enough. It has been with me five years too long. But you are not one
of the viceroy's men. If you were, perhaps even now instinctive self-preservation would keep
my mouth closed."
"How do you know?"
The old man laughed, "You seem suspicious - Come, I'll wager you think I'm trying to trap you
into denouncing the government. No, no. I am past politics."
"Past politics? Is a man ever past that? The words you used to describe the viceroy - what
were they? Murder, pillage, all that. You didn't sound objective. Not exactly. Not as if you were
past politics."
The old man shrugged, "Memories sting when they come suddenly. Listen! Judge for yourself!
When Siwenna was the provincial capital, I was a patrician and a member of the provincial
senate. My family was an old and honored one. One of my great-grandfathers had been- No,
never mind that. Past glories are poor feeding."
"I take it," said Mallow, "there was a civil war, or a revolution."
Barr's face darkened. "Civil wars are chronic in these degenerate days, but Siwenna had kept
apart. Under Stannell VI, it had almost achieved its ancient prosperity. But weak emperors
followed, and weak emperors mean strong viceroys, and our last viceroy - the same Wiscard,
whose remnants still prey on the commerce among the Red Stars - aimed at the Imperial
Purple. He wasn't the first to aim. And if he had succeeded, he wouldn't have been the first to
succeed.
"But he failed. For when the Emperor's Admiral approached the province at the head of a fleet,
Siwenna itself rebelled against its rebel viceroy." He stopped, sadly.
Mallow found himself tense on the edge of his seat, and relaxed slowly, "Please continue, sir."
"Thank you," said Barr, wearily. "It's kind of you to humor an old man. They rebelled; or I should
say, we rebelled, for I was one of the minor leaders. Wiscard left Siwenna, barely ahead of us,
and the planet, and with it the province, were thrown open to the admiral with every gesture of
loyalty to the Emperor. Why we did this, -I'm not sure. Maybe we felt loyal to the symbol, if not
the person, of the Emperor, -a cruel and vicious child. Maybe we feared the horrors of a siege."
"Well?" urged Mallow, gently.
"Well, came the grim retort, "that didn't suit the admiral. He wanted the glory of conquering a
rebellious province and his men wanted the loot such conquest would involve. So while the
people were still gathered in every large city, cheering the Emperor and his admiral, he
occupied all armed centers, and then ordered the population put to the nuclear blast."
"On what pretext?"
"On the pretext that they had rebelled against their viceroy, the Emperor's anointed. And the
admiral became the new viceroy, by virtue of one month of massacre, pillage and complete
horror. I had six sons. Five died - variously. I had a daughter. I hope she died, eventually. /
escaped because I was old. I came here, too old to cause even our viceroy worry." He bent his
gray head, "They left me nothing, because I had helped drive out a rebellious governor and
deprived an admiral of his glory."
Mallow sat silent, and waited. Then, "What of your sixth son?" he asked softly.
"Eh?" Barr smiled acidly. "He is safe, for he has joined the admiral as a common soldier under
an assumed name. He is a gunner in the viceroy's personal fleet. Oh, no, I see your eyes. He is
not an unnatural son. He visits me when he can and gives me what he can. He keeps me alive.
And some day, our great and glorious viceroy will grovel to his death, and it will be my son who
will be his executioner."
"And you tell this to a stranger? You endanger your son."
"No. I help him, by introducing a new enemy. And were I a friend of the viceroy, as I am his
enemy, I would tell him to string outer space with ships, clear to the rim of the Galaxy."
"There are no ships there?"
"Did you find any? Did any space-guards question your entry? With ships few enough, and the
bordering provinces filled with their share of intrigue and iniquity, none can be spared to guard
the barbarian outer suns. No danger ever threatened us from the broken edge of the Galaxy,
-until you came."
"I? I'm no danger."
"There will be more after you."
Mallow shook his head slowly, "I'm not sure I understand you."
"Listen!" There was a feverish edge to the old man's voice. "I knew you when you entered. You
have a force-shield about your body, or had when I first saw you."
Doubtful silence, then, "Yes, -I had."
"Good. That was a flaw, but you didn't know that. There are some things I know. It's out of
fashion in these decaying times to be a scholar. Events race and flash past and who cannot
fight the tide with nuclear-blast in hand is swept away, as I was. But I was a scholar, and I know
that in all the history of nucleics, no portable force-shield was ever invented. We have
force-shields - huge, lumbering powerhouses that will protect a city, or even a ship, but not
one, single man."
"Ah?" Mallow's underlip thrust out. "And what do you deduce from that?"
"There have been stories percolating through space. They travel strange paths and become
distorted with every parsec, -but when I was young there was a small ship of strange men, who
did not know our customs and could not tell where they came from. They talked of magicians at
the edge of the Galaxy; magicians who glowed in the darkness, who flew unaided through the
air, and whom weapons would not touch.
"We laughed. I laughed, too. I forgot it till today. But you glow in the darkness, and I don't think
my blaster, if I had one, would hurt you. Tell me, can you fly through air as you sit there now?"
Mallow said calmly, "I can make nothing of all this."
Barr smiled, "I'm content with the answer. I do not examine my guests. But if there are
magicians; if you are one of them; there may some day be a great influx of them, or you.
Perhaps that would be well. Maybe we need new blood." He muttered soundlessly to himself,
then, slowly, "But it works the other way, too. Our new viceroy also dreams, as did our old
Wiscard."
"Also after the Emperor's crown?"
Barr nodded, "My son hears tales. In the viceroy's personal entourage, one could scarcely help
it. And he tells me of them. Our new viceroy would not refuse the Crown if offered, but he
guards his line of retreat. There are stories that, failing Imperial heights, he plans to carve out a
new Empire in the Barbarian hinterland. It is said, but I don't vouch for this, that he has already
given one of his daughters as wife to a Kinglet somewhere in the uncharted Periphery."
"If one listened to every story-"
"I know. There are many more. I'm old and I babble nonsense. But what do you say?" And
those sharp, old eyes peered deep.
The trader considered, "I say nothing. But I'd like to ask something. Does Siwenna have
nuclear power? Now, wait, I know that it possesses the knowledge of nucleics. I mean, do they
have power generators intact, or did the recent sack destroy them?"
"Destroy them? Oh, no. Half a planet would be wiped out before the smallest power station
would be touched. They are irreplaceable and the suppliers of the strength of the fleet." Almost
proudly, "We have the largest and best on this side of Trantor itself."
"Then what would I do first if I wanted to see these generators?"
"Nothing!" replied Barr, decisively. "You couldn't approach any military center without being
shot down instantly. Neither could anyone. Siwenna is still deprived of civic rights."
"You mean all the power stations are under the military?"
"No. There are the small city stations, the ones supplying power for heating and lighting homes,
powering vehicles and so forth. Those are almost as bad. They're controlled by the tech-men."
"Who are they?"
"A specialized group which supervises the power plants. The honor is hereditary, the young
ones being brought up in the profession as apprentices. Strict sense of duty, honor, and all that.
No one but a tech-man could enter a station."
"I see."
"I don't say, though," added Barr, "that there aren't cases where tech-men haven't been bribed.
In days when we have nine emperors in fifty years and seven of these are assassinated, -when
every space-captain aspires to the usurpation of a viceroyship, and every viceroy to the
Imperium,
I suppose even a tech-man can fall prey to money. But it would require a good deal, and I have
none. Have you?"
"Money? No. But does one always bribe with money?"
"What else, when money buys all else."
"There is quite enough that money won't buy. And now if you'll tell me the nearest city with one
of the stations, and how best to get there, I'll thank you."
"Wait!" Barr held out his thin hands. "Where do you rush? You come here, but / ask no
questions. In the city, where the inhabitants are still called rebels, you would be challenged by
the first soldier or guard who heard your accent and saw your clothes."
He rose and from an obscure comer of an old chest brought out a booklet. "My passport,
-forged. I escaped with it."
He placed it in Mallow's hand and folded the fingers over it. "The description doesn't fit, but if
you flourish it, the chances are many to one they will not look closely."
"But you. You'll be left without one."
The old exile shrugged cynically, "What of it? And a further caution. Curb your tongue! Your
accent is barbarous, your idioms peculiar, and every once in a while you deliver yourself of the
most astounding archaisms. The less you speak, the less suspicion you will draw upon
yourself. Now I'll tell you how to get to the city-"
Five minutes later, Mallow was gone.
He returned but once, for a moment, to the old patrician's house, before leaving it entirely,
however. And when Onum Barr stepped into his little garden early the next morning, he found a
box at his feet. It contained provisions, concentrated provisions such as one would find aboard
ship, and alien in taste and preparation.
But they were good, and lasted long.
11 .
The tech-man was short, and his skin glistened with well-kept plumpness. His hair was a fringe
and his skull shone through pinkly. The rings on his fingers were thick and heavy, his clothes
were scented, and he was the first man Mallow had met on the planet who hadn't looked
hungry.
The tech-man's lips pursed peevishly, "Now, my man, quickly. I have things of great importance
waiting for me. You seem a stranger-" He seemed to evaluate Mallow's definitely
un-Siwennese costume and his eyelids were heavy with suspicion.
"I am not of the neighborhood," said Mallow, calmly, "but the matter is irrelevant. I have had the
honor to send you a little gift yesterday-"
The tech-man's nose lifted, "I received it. An interesting gewgaw. I may have use for it on
occasion."
"I have other and more interesting gifts. Quite out of the gewgaw stage."
"Oh-h?" The tech-man's voice lingered thoughtfully over the monosyllable. "I think I already see
the course of the interview; it has happened before. You are going to give me some trifle or
other. A few credits, perhaps a cloak, second-rate jewelry; anything your little soul may think
sufficient to corrupt a tech-man." His lower lip puffed out belligerently, "And I know what you
wish in exchange. There have been others and to spare with the same bright idea. You wish to
be adopted into our clan. You wish to be taught the mysteries of nucleics and the care of the
machines. You think because you dogs of Siwenna - and probably your strangerhood is
assumed for safety's sake - are being daily punished for your rebellion that you can escape
what you deserve by throwing over yourselves the privileges and protections of the tech-man's
guild."
Mallow would have spoken, but the tech-man raised himself into a sudden roar. "And now leave
before I report your name to the Protector of the City. Do you think that I would betray the trust?
The Siwennese traitors that preceded me would have - perhaps! But you deal with a different
breed now. Why, Galaxy, I marvel that I do not kill you myself at this moment with my bare
hands."
Mallow smiled to himself. The entire speech was patently artificial in tone and content, so that
all the dignified indignation degenerated into uninspired farce.
The trader glanced humorously at the two flabby hands that had been named as his possible
executioners then and there, and said, "Your Wisdom, you are wrong on three counts. First, I
am not a creature of the viceroy come to test your loyalty. Second, my gift is something the
Emperor himself in all his splendor does not and will never possess. Third, what I wish in return
is very little; a nothing; a mere breath."
"So you say!" He descended into heavy sarcasm. "Come, what is this imperial donation that
your godlike power wishes to bestow upon me? Something the Emperor doesn't have, eh?" He
broke into a sharp squawk of derision.
Mallow rose and pushed the chair aside, "I have waited three days to see you, Your Wisdom,
but the display will take only three seconds. If you will just draw that blaster whose butt I see
very near your hand-"
"Eh?"
"And shoot me, I will be obliged."
"What?”
"If I am killed, you can tell the police I tried to bribe you into betraying guild secrets. You'll
receive high praise. If I am not killed, you may have my shield."
For the first time, the tech-man became aware of the dimly-white illumination that hovered
closely about his visitor, as though he had been dipped in pearl-dust. His blaster raised to the
level and with eyes a-squint in wonder and suspicion, he closed contact.
The molecules of air caught in the sudden surge of atomic disruption, tore into glowing, burning
ions, and marked out the blinding thin line that struck at Mallow's heart - and splashed!
While Mallow's look of patience never changed, the nuclear forces that tore at him consumed
themselves against that fragile, pearly illumination, and crashed back to die in mid-air.
The tech-man's blaster dropped to the floor with an unnoticed crash.
Mallow said, "Does the Emperor have a personal force-shield? You can have one."
The tech-man stuttered, "Are you a tech-man?"
"No."
"Then - then where did you get that?"
"What do you care?" Mallow was coolly contemptuous. "Do you want it?" A thin, knobbed chain
fell upon the desk, "There it is."
The tech-man snatched it up and fingered it nervously, "Is this complete?"
"Complete."
"Where's the power?"
Mallow's finger fell upon the largest knob, dull in its leaden case.
The tech-man looked up, and his face was congested with blood, "Sir, I am a tech-man, senior
grade. I have twenty years behind me as supervisor and I studied under the great Bier at the
University of Trantor. If you have the infernal charlatanry to tell me that a small container the
size of a - of a walnut, blast it, holds a nuclear generator, I'll have you before the Protector in
three seconds."
"Explain it yourself then, if you can. I say it's complete."
The tech-man's flush faded slowly as he bound the chain about his waist, and, following
Mallow's gesture, pushed the knob. The radiance that surrounded him shone into dim relief. His
blaster lifted, then hesitated. Slowly, he adjusted it to an almost burnless minimum.
And then, convulsively, he closed circuit and the nuclear fire dashed against his hand,
harmlessly.
.He whirled, "And what if I shoot you now, and keep the shield."
"Try!" said Mallow. "Do you think I gave you my only sample?" And he, too, was solidly incased
in light.
The tech-man giggled nervously. The blaster clattered onto the desk. He said, "And what is this
mere nothing, this breath, that you wish in return'?"
"I want to see your generators."
"You realize that that is forbidden. It would mean ejection into space for both of us-"
"I don't want to touch them or have anything to do with them. I want to see them - from a
distance."
"If not?"
"If not, you have your shield, but I have other things. For one thing, a blaster especially
designed to pierce that shield."
"Hm-m-m." The tech-man's eyes shifted. "Come with me."
12 .
The tech-man's home was a small two-story affair on the Outskirts of the huge, cubiform,
windowless affair that dominated the center of the city. Mallow passed from one to the other
through an underground passage, and found himself in the silent, ozone-tinged atmosphere of
the powerhouse.
For fifteen minutes, he followed his guide and said nothing. His eyes missed nothing. His
fingers touched nothing. And then, the tech-man said in strangled tones, "Have you had
enough? I couldn't trust my underlings in this case."
"Could you ever?" asked Mallow, ironically. "I've had enough."
They were back in the office and Mallow said, thoughtfully, "And all those generators are in
your hands?"
"Every one," said the tech-man, with more than a touch of complacency.
"And you keep them running and in order?"
"Right!"
"And if they break down?"
The tech-man shook his head indignantly, "They don't break down. They never break down.
They were built for eternity."
"Eternity is a long time. Just suppose-"
"It is unscientific to suppose meaningless cases."
"All right. Suppose I were to blast a vital part into nothingness? I suppose the machines aren't
immune to nuclear forces? Suppose I fuse a vital connection, or smash a quartz D-tube?"
"Well, then," shouted the tech-man, furiously, "you would be killed."
"Yes, I know that," Mallow was shouting, too, "but what about the generator? Could you repair
it?"
"Sir," the tech-man howled his words, "you have had a fair return. You've had what you asked
for. Now get out! I owe you nothing more!"
Mallow bowed with a satiric respect and left.
Two days later he was back where the Far Star waited to return with him to the planet,
Terminus.
And two days later, the tech-man's shield went dead, and for all his puzzling and cursing never
glowed again.
13 .
Mallow relaxed for almost the first time in six months. He was on his back in the sunroom of his
new house, stripped to the skin. His great, brown arms were thrown up and out, and the
muscles tautened into a stretch, then faded into repose.
The man beside him placed a cigar between Mallow's teeth and lit it. He champed on one of his
own and said, "You must be overworked. Maybe you need a long rest."
"Maybe I do, Jael, but I'd rather rest in a council seat. Because I'm going to have that seat, and
you're going to help me."
Ankor Jael raised his eyebrows and said, "How did I get into this?"
"You got in obviously. Firstly, you're an old dog of a politico. Secondly, you were booted out of
your cabinet seat by Jorane Sutt, the same fellow who'd rather lose an eyeball than see me in
the council. You don't think much of my chances, do you?"
"Not much," agreed the ex-Minister of Education. "You're a Smyrnian."
"That's no legal bar. I've had a lay education."
"Well, come now. Since when does prejudice follow any law but its own. Now, how about your
own man - this Jaim Twer? What does he say?"
"He spoke about running me for council almost a year ago," replied Mallow easily, "but I've
outgrown him. He couldn't have pulled it off in any case. Not enough depth. He's loud and
forceful - but that's only an expression of nuisance value. I'm off to put over a real coup. I need
you."
"Jorane Sutt is the cleverest politician on the planet and he'll be against you. I don't claim to be
able to outsmart him. And don't think he doesn't fight hard, and dirty."
"I've got money."
"Mat helps. But it takes a lot to buy off prejudice, you dirty Smyrnian."
"I'll have a lot."
"Well, I'll look into the matter. But don't ever you crawl up on your hind legs and bleat that I
encouraged you in the matter. Who's that?"
Mallow pulled the corners of his mouth down, and said, "Jorane Sutt himself, I think. He's early,
and I can understand it. I’ve been dodging him for a month. Look, Jael, get into the next room,
and turn the speaker on low. I want you to listen."
He helped the council member out of the room with a shove of his bare foot, then scrambled up
and into a silk robe. The synthetic sunlight faded to normal power.
The secretary to the mayor entered stiffly, while the solemn major-domo tiptoed the door shut
behind him.
Mallow fastened his belt and said, "Take your choice of chairs, Sutt."
Sutt barely cracked a flickering smile. The chair he chose was comfortable but he did not relax
into it. From its edge, he said, "If you'll state your terms to begin with, we'll get down to
business."
"What terms?"
"You wish to be coaxed? Well, then, what, for instance, did you do at Korell? Your report was
incomplete."
"I gave it to you months ago. You were satisfied then."
Yes," Sutt rubbed his forehead thoughtfully with one finger, "but since then your activities have
been significant. We know a good deal of what you're doing, Mallow. We know, exactly, how
many factories you're putting up; in what a hurry you're doing it; and how much it's costing you.
And there's this palace you have," he gazed about him with a cold lack of appreciation, "which
set you back considerably more than my annual salary; and a swathe you've been cutting - a
very considerable and expensive swathe - through the upper layers of Foundation society."
"So? Beyond proving that you employ capable spies, what does it show?"
"It shows you have money you didn't have a year ago. And that can show anything - for
instance, that a good deal went on at Korell that we know nothing of. Where are you getting
your money?"
"My dear Sutt, you can't really expect me to tell you."
"I don't."
"I didn't think you did. That's why I'm going to tell you. It's straight from the treasure-chests of
the Commdor of Korell."
Sutt blinked.
Mallow smiled and continued. "Unfortunately for you, the money is quite legitimate. I'm a Master
Trader and the money I received was a quantity of wrought iron and chromite in exchange for a
number of trinkets I was able to supply him with. Fifty per cent of the profit is mine by
hidebound contract with the Foundation. The other half goes to the government at the end of
the year when all good citizens pay their income tax."
"There was no mention of any trade agreement in your report."
"Nor was there any mention of what I had for breakfast that day, or the name of my current
mistress, or any other irrelevant detail." Mallow's smile was fading into a sneer. "I was sent - to
quote yourself - to keep my eyes open. They were never, shut. You wanted to find out what
happened to the captured Foundation merchant ships. I never saw or heard of them. You
wanted to find out if Korell had nuclear power. My report tells of nuclear blasters in the
possession of the Commdor's private bodyguard. I saw no other signs. And the blasters I did
see are relics of the old Empire, and may be show-pieces that do not work, for all my
knowledge.
"So far, I followed orders, but beyond that I was, and. still am, a free agent. According to the
laws of the Foundation, a Master Trader may open whatever new markets he can, and receive
therefrom his due half of the profits. What are your objections? I don't see them."
Sutt bent his eyes carefully towards the wall and spoke with a difficult lack of anger, "It is the
general custom of all traders to advance the religion with their trade."
"I adhere to law, and not to custom."
"There are times when custom can be the higher law."
"Then appeal to the courts."
Sutt raised somber eyes which seemed to retreat into their sockets. "You're a Smyrnian after
all. It seems naturalization and education can't wipe out the taint in the blood. Listen, and try to
understand, just the same.
"This goes beyond money, or markets. We have the science of the great Hari Seldon to prove
that upon us depends the future empire of the Galaxy, and from the course that leads to that
Imperium we cannot turn. The religion we have is our all-important instrument towards that end.
With it we have brought the Four Kingdoms under our control, even at the moment when they
would have crushed us. It is the most potent device known with which to control men and
worlds.
"The primary reason for the development of trade and traders was to introduce and spread this
religion more quickly, and to insure that the introduction of new techniques and a new economy
would be subject to our thorough and intimate control."
Fie paused for breath, and Mallow interjected quietly, "I know the theory. I understand it
entirely."
"Do you? It is more than I expected. Then you see, of course, that your attempt at trade for its
own sake; at mass production of worthless gadgets, which can only affect a world's economy
superficially; at the subversion of interstellar policy to the god of profits; at the divorce of
nuclear power from our controlling religion - can only end with the overthrow and complete
negation of the policy that has worked successfully for a century."
"And time enough, too," said Mallow, indifferently, "for a policy outdated, dangerous and
impossible. Flowever well your religion has succeeded in the Four Kingdoms, scarcely another
world in the Periphery has accepted it. At the time we seized control of the Kingdoms, there
were a sufficient number of exiles, Galaxy knows, to spread the story of how Salvor Hardin
used the priesthood and the superstition of the people to overthrow the independence and
power of the secular monarchs. And if that wasn't enough, the case of Askone two decades
back made it plain enough. There isn't a ruler in the Periphery now that wouldn't sooner cut his
own throat than let a priest of the Foundation enter the territory.
"I don't propose to force Korell or any other world to accept something I know they don't want.
No, Sutt. If nuclear power makes them dangerous, a sincere friendship through trade will be
many times better than an insecure overlordship, based on the hated supremacy of a foreign
spiritual power, which, once it weakens ever so slightly, can only fall entirely and leave nothing
substantial behind except an immortal fear and hate."
Suit said cynically, "Very nicely put. So, to get back to the original point of discussion, what are
your terms? What do you require to exchange your ideas for mine?"
"You think my convictions are for sale?"
"Why not?" came the cold response. "Isn't that your business, buying and selling?"
"Only at a profit," said Mallow, unoffended. "Can you offer me more than I'm getting as is?"
"You could have three-quarters of your trade profits, rather than half."
Mallow laughed shortly, "A fine offer. The whole of the trade on your terms would fall far below
- a tenth share on mine. Try harder than that."
"You could have a council seat."
"I'll have that anyway, without and despite you."
With a sudden movement, Sutt clenched his fist, "You could also save yourself a prison term.
Of twenty years, if I have my way. Count the profit in that."
"No profit at all, but can you fulfill such a threat?"
"How about a trial for murder?"
"Whose murder?" asked Mallow, contemptuously.
Sutt's voice was harsh now, though no louder than before, "The murder of an Anacreonian
priest, in the service of the Foundation."
"Is that so now? And what's your evidence?"
The secretary to the mayor leaned forward, "Mallow, I'm not bluffing. The preliminaries are
over. I have only to sign one final paper and the case of the Foundation versus Hober Mallow,
Master Trader, is begun. You abandoned a subject of the Foundation to torture and death at
the hands of an alien mob, Mallow, and you have only five seconds to prevent the punishment
due you. For myself, I'd rather you decided to bluff it out. You'd be safer as a destroyed enemy,
than as a doubtfully-converted friend."
Mallow said solemnly, "You have your wish."
"Good!" and the secretary smiled savagely. "It was the mayor who wished the preliminary
attempt at compromise, not I. Witness that I did not try too hard."
The door opened before him, and he left.
Mallow looked up as Ankor Jael re-entered the room.
Mallow said, "Did you hear him?"
The politician flopped to the floor. "I never heard him as angry as that, since I've known the
snake."
"All right. What do you make of it?"
"Well, I'll tell you. A foreign policy of domination through spiritual means is his idee fixe, but it's
my notion that his ultimate aims aren't spiritual. I was fired out of the Cabinet for arguing on the
same issue, as I needn't tell you."
"You needn't. And what are those unspiritual aims according to your notion?"
Jael grew serious, "Well, he's not stupid, so he must see the bankruptcy of our religious policy,
which has hardly made a single conquest for us in seventy years. He's obviously using it for
purposes of his own.
"Now any dogma primarily based on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on
others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the
user. For a hundred years now, we've supported a ritual and mythology that is becoming more
and more venerable, traditional - and immovable. In some ways, it isn't under our control any
more."
"In what ways?" demanded Mallow. "Don't stop. I want your thoughts."
"Well, suppose one man, one ambitious man, uses the force of religion against us, rather than
for us."
"You mean Sutt-"
"You're right. I mean Sutt. Listen, man, if he could mobilize the various hierarchies on the
subject planets against the Foundation in the name of orthodoxy, what chance would we
stand? By planting himself at the head of the standards of the pious, he could make war on
heresy, as represented by you, for instance, and make himself king eventually. After all, it was
Hardin who said: 'A nuclear blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.'"
Mallow slapped his bare thigh, "All right, Jael, then get me in that council, and I'll fight him."
Jael paused, then said significantly, "Maybe not. What was all that about having a priest
lynched? Is isn't true, is it?"
"It's true enough," Mallow said, carelessly.
Jael whistled, "Has he definite proof?"
"He should have." Mallow hesitated, then added, "Jaim Twer was his man from the beginning,
though neither of them knew that I knew that. And Jaim Twer was an eyewitness."
Jael shook his head. "Uh-uh. That's bad."
"Bad? What's bad about it? That priest was illegally upon the planet by the Foundation's own
laws. He was obviously used by the Korellian government as a bait, whether involuntary or not.
By all the laws of common-sense, I had no choice but one action - and that action was strictly
within the law. If he brings me to trial, he'll do nothing but make a prime fool of himself."
And Jael shook his head again, "No, Mallow, you've missed it. I told you he played dirty. He's
not out to convict you; he knows he can't do that. But he is out to ruin your standing with the
people. You heard what he said. Custom is higher than law, at times. You could walk out of the
trial scot-free, but if the people think you threw a priest to the dogs, your popularity is gone.
"They'll admit you did the legal thing, even the sensible thing. But just the same you'll have
been, in their eyes, a cowardly dog, an unfeeling brute, a hard-hearted monster. And you would
never get elected to the council. You might even lose your rating as Master Trader by having
your citizenship voted away from you. You're not native born, you know. What more do you
think Sutt can want?" Mallow frowned stubbornly, "So!" "My boy," said Jael. "I'll stand by you,
but / can't help. You're on the spot, -dead center."
14 .
The council chamber was full in a very literal sense on the fourth day of the trial of Hober
Mallow, Master Trader. The only councilman absent was feebly cursing the fractured skull that
had bedridden him. The galleries were filled to the aisleways and ceilings with those few of the
crowd who by influence, wealth, or sheer diabolic perseverance had managed to get in. The
rest filled the square outside, in swarming knots about the open-air trimensional 'visors.
Ankor Jael made his way into the chamber with the near-futile aid and exertions of the police
department, and then through the scarcely smaller confusion within to Hober Mallow's seat.
Mallow turned with relief, "By Seldon, you cut it thin. Have you got it?"
"Here, take it," said Jael. "It's everything you asked for."
"Good. How are they taking it outside?"
"They're wild clear through." Jael stirred uneasily, "You should never have allowed public
hearings. You could have stopped them."
"I didn't want to."
"There's lynch talk. And Publis Manlio's men on the outer planets-"
"I wanted to ask you about that, Jael. He's stirring up the Hierarchy against me, is he?"
"Is he? It's the sweetest setup you ever saw, As Foreign Secretary, he handles the prosecution
in a case of interstellar law. As High Priest and Primate of the Church, he rouses the fanatic
hordes-"
"Well, forget it. Do you remember that Hardin quotation you threw at me last month? We'll show
them that the nuclear blaster can point both ways."
The mayor was taking his seat now and the council members were rising in respect.
Mallow whispered, "It's my turn today. Sit here and watch the fun."
The day's proceedings began and fifteen minutes later, Hober Mallow stepped through a hostile
whisper to the empty space before the mayor's bench. A lone beam of light centered upon him
and in the public 'visors of the city, as well as on the myriads of private 'visors in almost every
home of the Foundation's planets, the lonely giant figure of a man stared out defiantly.
He began easily and quietly, "To save time, I will admit the truth of every point made against
me by the prosecution. The story of the priest and the mob as related by them is perfectly
accurate in every detail."
There was a stirring in the chamber and a triumphant mass-snarl from the gallery. He waited
patiently for silence.
"However, the picture they presented fell short of completion. I ask the privilege of supplying
the completion in my own fashion. My story may seem irrelevant at first. I ask your indulgence
for that."
Mallow made no reference to the notes before him.
"I begin at the same time as the prosecution did; the day of my meeting with Jorane Sutt and
Jaim Twer. What went on at those meetings you know. The conversations have been
described, and to that description I have nothing to add - except my own thoughts of that day.
"They were suspicious thoughts, for the events of that day were queer. Consider. Two people,
neither of whom I knew more than casually, make unnatural and somewhat unbelievable
propositions to me. One, the secretary to the mayor, asks me to play the part of intelligence
agent to the government in a highly confidential matter, the nature and importance of which has
already been explained to you. The other, self-styled leader of a political party, asks me to run
for a council seat.
"Naturally I looked for the ulterior motive. Sutt's seemed evident. He didn't trust me. Perhaps he
thought I was selling nuclear power to enemies and plotting rebellion. And perhaps he was
forcing the issue, or thought he was. In that case, he would need a man of his own near me on
my proposed mission, as a spy. The last thought, however, did not occur to me until later on,
when Jaim Twer came on the scene.
"Consider again: Twer presents himself as a trader, retired into politics, yet I know of no details
of his trading career, although my knowledge of the field is immense. And further, although
Twer boasted of a lay education, he had never heard of a Seldon crisis."
Hober Mallow waited to let the significance sink in and was rewarded with the first silence he
had yet encountered, as the gallery caught its collective breath. That was for the inhabitants of
Terminus itself. The men of the Outer Planets could hear only censored versions that would
suit the requirements of religion. They would hear nothing of Seldon crises. But there would be
further strokes they would not miss.
Mallow continued:
"Who here can honestly state that any man with a lay education can possibly be ignorant of the
nature of a Seldon crisis? There is only one type of education upon the Foundation that
excludes all mention of the planned history of Seldon and deals only with the man himself as a
semi-mythical wizard-
"I knew at that instant that Jaim Twer had never been a trader. I knew then that he was in holy
orders and perhaps a full-fledged priest; and, doubtless, that for the three years he had
pretended to head a political party of the traders, he had been a bought man of Jorane Sutt.
"At the moment, I struck in the dark. I did not know Sun's purposes with regard to myself, but
since he seemed to be feeding me rope liberally, I handed him a few fathoms of my own. My
notion was that Twer was to be with me on my voyage as unofficial guardian on behalf of
Jorane Sutt. Well, if he didn't get on, I knew well there'd be other devices waiting - and those
others I might not catch in time. A known enemy is relatively safe. I invited Twer to come with
me. He accepted.
"That, gentlemen of the council, explains two things. First, it tells you that Twer is not a friend of
mine testifying against me reluctantly and for conscience' sake, as the prosecution would have
you believe. He is a spy, performing his paid job. Secondly, it explains a certain action of mine
on the occasion of the first appearance of the priest whom I am accused of having murdered -
an action as yet unmentioned, because unknown."
Now there was a disturbed whispering in the council. Mallow cleared his throat theatrically, and
continued:
"I hate to describe my feelings when I first heard that we had a refugee missionary on board. I
even hate to remember them. Essentially, they consisted of wild uncertainty. The event struck
me at the moment as a move by Sutt, and passed beyond my comprehension or calculation. I
was at sea - and completely.
"There was one thing I could do. I got rid of Twer for five minutes by sending him after my
officers. In his absence, I set up a Visual Record receiver, so that whatever happened might be
preserved for future study. This was in the hope, the wild but earnest hope, that what confused
me at the time might become plain upon review.
"I have gone over that Visual Record some fifty times since. I have it here with me now, and will
repeat the job a fifty-first time in your presence right now."
The mayor pounded monotonously for order, as the chamber lost its equilibrium and the gallery
roared. In five million homes on Terminus, excited observers crowded their receiving sets more
closely, and at the prosecutor's own bench, Jorane Sutt shook his head coldly at the nervous
high priest, while his eyes blazed fixedly on Mallow's face.
The center of the chamber was cleared, and the lights burnt low. Ankor Jael, from his bench on
the left, made the adjustments, and with a preliminary click, a holographic scene sprang to
view; in color, in three-dimensions, in every attribute of life but life itself.
There was the missionary, confused and battered, standing between the lieutenant and the
sergeant. Mallow's image waited silently, and then men filed in, Twer bringing up the rear.
The conversation played itself out, word for word. The sergeant was disciplined, and the
missionary was questioned. The mob appeared, their growl could be heard, and the Revered
Jord Parma made his wild appeal. Mallow drew his gun, and the missionary, as he was
dragged away, lifted his arms in a mad, final curse and a tiny flash of light came and went.
The scene ended, with the officers frozen at the horror of the situation, while Twer clamped
shaking hands over his ears, and Mallow calmly put his gun away.
The lights were on again; the empty space in the center of the floor was no longer even
apparently full. Mallow, the real Mallow of the present, took up the burden of his narration:
"The incident, you see, is exactly as the prosecution has presented it - on the surface. I'll
explain that shortly. Jaim Twer's emotions through the whole business shows clearly a priestly
education, by the way.
"It was on that same day that I pointed out certain incongruities in the episode to Twer. I asked
him where the missionary came from in the midst of the near-desolate tract we occupied at the
time. I asked further where the gigantic mob had come from with the nearest sizable town a
hundred miles away. The prosecution has paid no attention to such problems.
"Or to other points; for instance, the curious point of Jord Parma's blatant conspicuousness. A
missionary on Korell, risking his life in defiance of both Korellian and Foundation law, parades
about in a very new and very distinctive priestly costume. There's something wrong there. At
the time, I suggested that the missionary was an unwitting accomplice of the Commdor, who
was using him in an attempt to force us into an act of wildly illegal aggression, to justify, in law,
his subsequent destruction of our ship and of us.
"The prosecution has anticipated this justification of my actions. They have expected me to
explain that the safety of my ship, my crew, my mission itself were at stake and could not be
sacrificed for one man, when that man would, in any case, have been destroyed, with us or
without us. They reply by muttering about the Foundation's 'honor' and the necessity of
upholding our 'dignity' in order to maintain our ascendancy.
"For some strange reason, however, the prosecution has neglected Jord Parma himself, -as an
individual. They brought out no details concerning him; neither his birthplace, nor his education,
nor any detail of previous history. The explanation of this will also explain the incongruities I
have pointed out in the Visual Record you have just seen. The two are connected.
"The prosecution has advanced no details concerning Jord Parma because it cannot. That
scene you saw by Visual Record seemed phoney because Jord Parma was phoney. There
never was a Jord Parma. This whole trial is the biggest farce ever cooked up over an issue that
never existed. "
Once more he had to wait for the babble to die down. Fie said, slowly:
"I'm going to show you the enlargement of a single still from the Visual Record. It will speak for
itself. Lights again, Jael."
The chamber dimmed, and the empty air filled again with frozen figures in ghostly, waxen
illusion. The officers of the Far Star struck their stiff, impossible attitudes. A gun pointed from
Mallow's rigid hand. At his left, the Revered Jord Parma, caught in mid-shriek, stretched his
claws upward, while the failing sleeves hung halfway.
And from the missionary's hand there was that little gleam that in the previous showing had
flashed and gone. It was a permanent glow now.
"Keep your eye on that light on his hand," called Mallow from the shadows. "Enlarge that
scene, Jael!"
The tableau bloated quickly. Outer portions fell away as the missionary drew towards the center
and became a giant. Then there was only a hand and an arm, and then only a hand, which
filled everything and remained there in immense, hazy tautness.
The light had become a set of fuzzy, glowing letters: K S P.
"That," Mallow's voice boomed out, "is a sample of tatooing, gentlemen. Under ordinary light it
is invisible, but under ultraviolet light - with which I flooded the room in taking this Visual
Record, it stands out in high relief. I'll admit it is a naive method of secret identification, but it
works on Korell, where UV light is not to be found on street comers. Even in our ship, detection
was accidental.
"Perhaps some of you have already guessed what K S P stands for. Jord Parma knew his
priestly lingo well and did his job magnificently. Where he had learned it, and how, I cannot say,
but K S P stands for 'Korellian Secret Police.'"
Mallow shouted over the tumult, roaring against the noise, "I have collateral proof in the form of
documents brought from Korell, which I can present to the council if required.
"And where is now the prosecution's case? They have already made and re-made the
monstrous suggestion that I should have fought for the missionary in defiance of the law, and
sacrificed my mission, my ship, and myself to the 'honor' of the Foundation.
"But to do it for an impostor?
"Should I have done it then for a Korellian secret agent tricked out in the robes and verbal
gymnastics probably borrowed of an Anacreonian exile? Would Jorane Sutt and Publis Manlio
have had me fall into a stupid, odious trap-"
His hoarsened voice faded into the featureless background of a shouting mob. He was being
lifted onto shoulders, and carried to the mayor's bench. Out the windows, he could see a torrent
of madmen swarming into the square to add to the thousands there already.
Mallow looked about for Ankor Jael, but it was impossible to find any single face in the
incoherence of the mass. Slowly he became aware of a rhythmic, repeated shout, that was
spreading from a small beginning, and pulsing into insanity:
"Long live Mallow - long live Mallow - long live Mallow-"
15 .
Ankor Jael blinked at Mallow out of a haggard face. The last two days had been mad, sleepless
ones.
"Mallow, you've put on a beautiful show, so don't spoil it by jumping too high. You can't
seriously consider running for mayor. Mob enthusiasm is a powerful thing, but it's notoriously
fickle." '
"Exactly!" said Mallow, grimly, "so we must coddle it, and the best way to do that is to continue
the show."
"Now what?"
"You're to have Publis Manlio and Jorane Sutt arrested-"
"What!"
"Just what you hear. Have the mayor arrest them! I don't care what threats you use. I control
the mob, -for today, at any rate. He won't dare face them."
"But on what charge, man?"
"On the obvious one. They've been inciting the priesthood of the outer planets to take sides in
the factional quarrels of the Foundation. That's illegal, by Seldon. Charge them with
'endangering the state.' And I don't care about a conviction any more than they did in my case.
Just get them out of circulation until I'm mayor."
"It's half a year till election."
"Not too long!" Mallow was on his feet, and his sudden grip of Jael's arm was tight. "Listen, I'd
seize the government by force if I had to - the way Salvor Hardin did a hundred years ago.
There's still that Seldon crisis coming up, and when it comes I have to be mayor and high
priest. Both I"
Jael's brow furrowed. He said, quietly, "What's it going to be? Korell, after all?"
Mallow nodded, "Of course. They'll declare war, eventually, though I'm betting it'll take another
pair of years."
"With nuclear ships?"
"What do you think? Those three merchant ships we lost in their space sector weren't knocked
over with compressed-air pistols. Jael, they're getting ships from the Empire itself. Don't open
your mouth like a fool. I said the Empire! It's still there, you know. It many be gone here in the
Periphery but in the Galactic center it's still very much alive. And one false move means that it,
itself, may be on our neck. That's why I must be mayor and high priest. I'm the only man who
knows how to fight the crisis."
Jael swallowed dryly, "How? What are you going to do?"
"Nothing."
Jael smiled uncertainly, "Really! All of that!"
But Mallow's answer was incisive, "When I'm boss of this Foundation, I'm going to do nothing.
One hundred percent of nothing, and that is the secret of this crisis."
16 .
Asper Argo, the Well-Beloved, Commdor of the Korellian Republic greeted his wife's entry by a
hangdog lowering of his scanty eyebrows. To her at least, his self-adopted epithet did not
apply. Even he knew that.
She said, in a voice as sleek as her hair and as cold as her eyes, "My gracious lord, I
understand, has finally come to a decision upon the fate of the Foundation upstarts."
"Indeed?" said the Commdor, sourly. "And what more does your versatile understanding
embrace?"
"Enough, my very noble husband. You had another of your vacillating consultations with your
councilors. Fine advisors." With infinite scorn, "A herd of palsied purblind idiots hugging their
sterile profits close to their sunken chests in the face of my father's displeasure."
"And who, my dear," was the mild response, "is the excellent source from which your
understanding understands all this?"
The Commdora laughed shortly, "If I told you, my source would be more corpse than source."
"Well, you'll have your own way, as always." The Commdor shrugged and turned away. "And
as for your father's displeasure: I much fear me it extends to a niggardly refusal to supply more
ships."
"More ships!" She blazed away, hotly, "And haven't you five? Don't deny it. I know you have
five; and a sixth is promised."
"Promised for the last year."
"But one - just one - can blast that Foundation into stinking rubble. Just one! One, to sweep
their little pygmy boats out of space."
"I couldn't attack their planet, even with a dozen."
"And how long would their planet hold out with their trade ruined, and their cargoes of toys and
trash destroyed?" "Those toys and trash mean money," he sighed. "A good deal of money."
"But if you had the Foundation itself, would you not have all it contained'? And if you had my
father's respect and gratitude, would you not have more than ever the Foundation could give
you? It's been three years - more - since that barbarian came with his magic sideshow. It's
long enough."
"My dear!" The Commdor turned and faced her. "I am growing old. I am weary. I lack the
resilience to withstand your rattling mouth. You say you know that I have decided. Well, I have.
It is over, and there is war between Korell and the Foundation."
"Well!" The Commdora's figure expanded and her eyes sparkled, "You learned wisdom at last,
though in your dotage. And now when you are master of this hinterland, you may be sufficiently
respectable to be of some weight and importance in the Empire. For one thing, we might leave
this barbarous world and attend the viceroy's court. Indeed we might."
She swept out, with a smile, and a hand on her hip. Her hair gleamed in the light.
The Commdor waited, and then said to the closed door, with malignance and hate, "And when I
am master of what you call the hinterland, I may be sufficiently respectable to do without your
father's arrogance and his daughter's tongue. Completely - without!"
17 .
The senior lieutenant of the Dark Nebula stared in horror at the visiplate.
"Great Galloping Galaxies!" It should have been a howl, but it was a whisper instead, "What's
that?"
It was a ship, but a whale to the Dark Nebula's minnow; and on its side was the
Spaceship-and-Sun of the Empire. Every alarm on the ship yammered hysterically.
The orders went out, and the Dark Nebula prepared to run if it could, and fight if it must, -while
down in the hyperwave room, a message stormed its way through hyperspace to the
Foundation.
Over and over again! Partly a plea for help, but mainly a warning of danger.
18 .
Flober Mallow shuffled his feet wearily as he leafed through the reports. Two years of the
mayoralty had made him a bit more housebroken, a bit softer, a bit more patient, -but it had not
made him learn to like government reports and the mind-breaking officialese in which they were
written.
"Flow many ships did they get?" asked Jael.
"Four trapped on the ground. Two unreported. All others accounted for and safe." Mallow
grunted, "We should have done better, but it's just a scratch."
There was no answer and Mallow looked up, "Does anything worry you?"
"I wish Sutt would get here," was the almost irrelevant answer.
"Ah, yes, and now we'll hear another lecture on the home front."
"No, we won't," snapped Jael, "but you're stubborn, Mallow. You may have worked out the
foreign situation to the last detail but you've never given a care about what goes on here on the
home planet."
"Well, that's your job, isn't it? What did I make you Minister of Education and Propaganda for?"
"Obviously to send me to an early and miserable grave, for all the co-operation you give me.
For the last year, I've been deafening you with the rising danger of Sutt and his Religionists.
What good will your plans be, if Sutt forces a special election and has you thrown out?"
"None, I admit."
"And your speech last night just about handed the election to Sutt with a smile and a pat. Was
there any necessity for being so frank?"
"Isn't there such a thing as stealing Sutt's thunder?"
"No," said Jael, violently, "not the way you did it. You claim to have foreseen everything, and
don't explain why you traded with Korell to their exclusive benefit for three years. Your only plan
of battle is to retire without a battle. You abandon all trade with the sectors of space near Korell.
You openly proclaim a stalemate. You promise no offensive, even in the future. Galaxy, Mallow,
what am I supposed to do with such a mess?"
"It lacks glamor?"
"It lacks mob emotion-appeal."
"Same thing."
"Mallow, wake up. You have two alternatives. Either you present the people with a dynamic
foreign policy, whatever your private plans are, or you make some sort of compromise with
Sutt."
Mallow said, "All right, if I've failed the first, let's try the second. Sutt's just arrived."
Sutt and Mallow had not met personally since the day of the trial, two years back. Neither
detected any change in the other, except for that subtle atmosphere about each which made it
quite evident that the roles of ruler and defier had changed.
Sutt took his seat without shaking hands.
Mallow offered a cigar and said, "Mind if Jael stays? He wants a compromise earnestly. He can
act as mediator if tempers rise."
Sutt shrugged, "A compromise will be well for you. Upon another occasion I once asked you to
state your terms. I presume the positions are reversed now."
"You presume correctly."
"Then there are my terms. You must abandon your blundering policy of economic bribery and
trade in gadgetry, and return to the tested foreign policy of our fathers."
"You mean conquest by missionary."
"Exactly."
"No compromise short of that?"
"None."
"Um-m-m." Mallow lit up very slowly and inhaled the tip of his cigar into a bright glow. "In
Hardin's time, when conquest by missionary was new and radical, men like yourself opposed it.
Now it is tried, tested, hallowed, -everything a Jorane Sutt would find well. But, tell me, how
would you get us out of our present mess?"
"Your present mess. I had nothing to do with it."
"Consider the question suitably modified."
"A strong offensive is indicated. The stalemate you seem to be satisfied with is fatal. It would be
a confession of weakness to all the worlds of the Periphery, where the appearance of strength
is all-important, and there's not one vulture among them that wouldn't join the assault for its
share of the corpse. You ought to understand that. You're from Smyrno, aren't you?"
Mallow passed over the significance of the remark. He said, "And if you beat Korell, what of the
Empire? That is the real enemy."
Sutt's narrow smile tugged at the comers of his mouth, "Oh, no, your records of your visit to
Siwenna were complete. The viceroy of the Normannic Sector is interested in creating
dissension in the Periphery for his own benefit, but only as a side issue. He isn't going to stake
everything on an expedition to the Galaxy's rim when he has fifty hostile neighbors and an
emperor to rebel against. I paraphrase your own words."
"Oh, yes he might, Sutt, if he thinks we're strong enough to be dangerous. And he might think
so, if we destroy Korell by the main force of frontal attack. We'd have to be considerably more
subtle."
"As for instance-"
Mallow leaned back, "Sutt, I'll give you your chance. I don't need you, but I can use you. So I'll
tell you what it's all about, and then you can either join me and receive a place in a coalition
cabinet, or you can play the martyr and rot in jail."
"Once before you tried that last trick."
"Not very hard, Sutt. The right time has only just come. Now listen." Mallow's eyes narrowed.
"When I first landed on Korell," he began, A bribed the Commdor with the trinkets and gadgets
that form the trader's usual stock. At the start, that, was meant only to get us entrance into a
steel foundry. I had no plan further than that, but in that I succeeded. I got what I wanted. But it
was only after my visit to the Empire that I first realized exactly what a weapon I could build that
trade into.
"This is a Seldon crisis we're facing, Sutt, and Seldon crises are not solved by individuals but by
historic forces. Hari Seldon, when he planned our course of future history, did not count on
brilliant heroics but on the broad sweeps of economics and sociology. So the solutions to the
various crises must be achieved by the forces that become available to us at the time.
"In this case, -trade!"
Sutt raised his eyebrows skeptically and took advantage of the pause, "I hope I am not of
subnormal intelligence, but the fact is that your vague lecture isn't very illuminating."
"It will become so," said Mallow. "Consider that until now the power of trade has been
underestimated. It has been thought that it took a priesthood under our control to make it a
powerful weapon. That is not so, and this is my contribution to the Galactic situation. Trade
without priests! Trade alone! It is strong enough. Let us become very simple and specific. Korell
is now at war with us. Consequently our trade with her has stopped. But, -notice that I am
making this as simple as a problem in addition, -in the past three years she has based her
economy more and more upon the nuclear techniques which we have introduced and which
only we can continue to supply. Now what do you suppose will happen once the tiny nuclear
generators begin failing, and one gadget after another goes out of commission?
"The small household appliances go first. After a half a year of this stalemate that you abhor, a
woman's nuclear knife won't work any more. Her stove begins failing. Her washer doesn't do a
good job. The temperature-humidity control in her house dies on a hot summer day. What
happens?"
He paused for an answer, and Sutt said calmly, "Nothing. People endure a good deal in war."
"Very true. They do. They'll send their sons out in unlimited numbers to die horribly on broken
spaceships. They'll bear up under enemy bombardment, if it means they have to live on stale
bread and foul water in caves half a mile deep. But it's very hard to bear up under little things
when the patriotic uplift of imminent danger is not present. It's going to, be a stalemate. There
will be no casualties, no bombardments, no battles.
"There will just be a knife that won't cut, and a stove that won't cook, and a house that freezes
in the winter. It will be annoying, and people will grumble."
Sutt said slowly, wonderingly, "Is that what you're setting your hopes on, man? What do you
expect? A housewives' rebellion? A Jacquerie? A sudden uprising of butchers and grocers with
their cleavers and bread-knives shouting 'Give us back our Automatic Super-Kleeno Nuclear
Washing Machines.'"
"No, sir," said Mallow, impatiently, "I do not. I expect, however, a general background of
grumbling and dissatisfaction which will be seized on by more important figures later on."
"And what more important figures are these?"
"The manufacturers, the factory owners, the industrialists of Korell. When two years of the
stalemate have gone, the machines in the factories will, one by one, begin to fail. Those
industries which we have changed from first to last with our new nuclear gadgets will find
themselves very suddenly ruined. The heavy industries will find themselves, en masse and at a
stroke, the owners of nothing but scrap machinery that won't work."
"The factories ran well enough before you came there, Mallow."
"Yes, Sutt, so they did - at about one-twentieth the profits, even if you leave out of
consideration the cost of reconversion to the original pre-nuclear state. With the industrialist
and financier and the average man all against him, how long will the Commdor hold out?"
"As long as he pleases, as soon as it occurs to him to get new nuclear generators from the
Empire."
And Mallow laughed joyously, "You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself.
You've missed everything, and understood nothing. Look, man, the Empire can replace
nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated
everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are
gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion.
"But we, -we, our little Foundation, our single world almost without metallic resources, -have
had to work with brute economy. Our generators have had to be the size of our thumb, because
it was all the metal we could afford. We had to develop new techniques and new methods,
-techniques and methods the Empire can't follow because they have degenerated past the
stage where they can make any really vital scientific advance.
"With all their nuclear shields, large enough to protect a ship, a city, an entire world; they could
never build one to protect a single man. To supply light and heat to a city, they have motors six
stories high, -I saw them - where ours could fit into this room. And when I told one of their
nuclear specialists that a lead container the size of a walnut contained a nuclear generator, he
almost choked with indignation on the spot.
"Why, they don't even understand their own colossi any longer. The machines work from
generation to generation automatically, and the caretakers are a hereditary caste who would be
helpless if a single D-tube in all that vast structure burnt out.
"The whole war is a battle between those two systems, between the Empire and the
Foundation; between the big and the little. To seize control of a world, they bribe with immense
ships that can make war, but lack all economic significance. We, on the other hand, bribe with
little things, useless in war, but vital to prosperity and profits.
"A king, or a Commdor, will take the ships and even make war. Arbitrary rulers throughout
history have bartered their subjects' welfare for what they consider honor, and glory, and
conquest. But it's still the little things in life that count - and Asper Argo won't stand up against
the economic depression that will sweep all Korell in two or three years."
Sutt was at the window, his back to Mallow and Jael. It was early evening now, and the few
stars that struggled feebly here at the very rim of the Galaxy sparked against the background of
the misty, wispy Lens that included the remnants of that Empire, still vast, that fought against
them.
Sutt said, "No. You are not the man.
You don't believe me?
"I mean I don't trust you. You're smooth-tongued. You befooled me properly when I thought I
had you under proper care on your first trip to Korell. When I thought I had you cornered at the
trial, you wormed your way out of it and into the mayor's chair by demagoguery. There is
nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn't another behind it; no statement that hasn't
three meanings.
"Suppose you were a traitor. Suppose your visit to the Empire had brought you a subsidy and a
promise of power. Your actions would be precisely what they are now. You would bring about a
war after having strengthened the enemy. You would force the Foundation into inactivity. And
you would advance a plausible explanation of everything, one so plausible it would convince
everyone."
"You mean there'll be no compromise?" asked Mallow, gently.
"I mean you must get out, by free will or force."
"I warned you of the only alternative to co-operation."
Jorane Sutt's face congested with blood in a sudden access of emotion. "And I warn you,
Hober Mallow of Smyrno, that if you arrest me, there will be no quarter. My men will stop
nowhere in spreading the truth about you, and the common people of the Foundation will unite
against their foreign ruler. They have a consciousness of destiny that a Smyrnian can never
understand - and that consciousness will destroy you."
Flober Mallow said quietly to the two guards who had entered, "Take him away. Fle's under
arrest."
Sutt said, "Your last chance."
Mallow stubbed out his cigar and never looked up.
And five minutes later, Jael stirred and said, wearily, "Well, now that you've made a martyr for
the cause, what next?"
Mallow stopped playing with the ash tray and looked up, "That's not the Sutt I used to know.
Fle's a blood-blind bull. Galaxy, he hates me."
"All the more dangerous then."
"More dangerous? Nonsense! Fle's lost all power of judgement."
Jael said grimly, "You're overconfident, Mallow. You're ignoring the possibility of a popular
rebellion."
Mallow looked up, grim in his turn, "Once and for all, Jael, there is no possibility of a popular
rebellion."
"You're sure of yourself!"
"I'm sure of the Seldon crisis and the historical validity of their solutions, externally and
internally. There are some things I didn't tell Suit right now. He tried to control the Foundation
itself by religious forces as he controlled the outer worlds, and he failed, -which is the surest
sign that in the Seldon scheme, religion is played out.
"Economic control worked differently. And to paraphrase that famous Salvor Hardin quotation of
yours, it's a poor nuclear blaster that won't point both ways. If Korell prospered with our trade,
so did we. If Korellian factories fail without our trade; and if the prosperity of the outer worlds
vanishes with commercial isolation; so will our factories fail and our prosperity vanish.
"And there isn't a factory, not a trading center, not a shipping line that isn't under my control;
that I couldn't squeeze to nothing if Sutt attempts revolutionary propaganda. Where his
propaganda succeeds, or even looks as though it might succeed, I will make certain that
prosperity dies. Where it fails, prosperity will continue, because my factories will remain fully
staffed.
"So by the same reasoning which makes me sure that the Korellians will revolt in favor of
prosperity, I am sure we will not revolt against it. The game will be played out to its end."
"So then," said Jael, "you're establishing a plutocracy. You're making us a land of traders and
merchant princes. Then what of the future?"
Mallow lifted his gloomy face, and exclaimed fiercely, "What business of mine is the future? No
doubt Seldon has foreseen it and prepared against it. There will be other crises in the time to
come when money power has become as dead a force as religion is now. Let my successors
solve those new problems, as I have solved the one of today."
KORELL-.. .And so after three years of a war which was certainly the most unfought war on
record, the Republic of Korell surrendered unconditionally, and Hober Mallow took his place
next to Hari Seldon and Salvor Hardin in the hearts of the people of the Foundation.
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Isaac Asimov was born in the Soviet Union to his great surprise. He moved quickly to correct
the situation. When his parents emigrated to the United States, Isaac (three years old at the
time) stowed away in their baggage. He has been an American citizen since the age of eight.
Brought up in Brooklyn, and educated in its public schools, he eventually found his way to
Columbia University and, over the protests of the school administration, managed to annex a
series of degrees in chemistry, up to and including a Ph.D. He then infiltrated Boston University
and climbed the academic ladder, ignoring all cries of outrage, until he found himself Professor
of Biochemistry.
Meanwhile, at the age of nine, he found the love of his life (in the inanimate sense) when he
discovered his first science-fiction magazine. By the time he was eleven, he began to write
stories, and at eighteen, he actually worked up the nerve to submit one. It was rejected. After
four long months of tribulation and suffering, he sold his first story and, thereafter, he never
looked back.
In 1941 , when he was twenty-one years old, he wrote the classic short story "Nightfall" and his
future was assured. Shortly before that he had begun writing his robot stories, and shortly after
that he had begun his Foundation series.
What was left except quantity? At the present time, he has published over 260 books,
distributed through every major division of the Dewey system of library classification, and
shows no signs of slowing up. He remains as youthful, as lively, and as lovable as ever, and
grows more handsome with each year. You can be sure that this is so since he has written this
little essay himself and his devotion to absolute objectivity is notorious.
He is married to Janet Jeppson, psychiatrist and writer, has two children by a previous
marriage, and lives in New York City.
ASIMOV
FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE
THE FOUNDATION NOVELS
FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE
ISAAC ASIMOV
PROLOGUE
Contents
PART I THE GENERAL
1. SEARCH FOR MAGICIANS
2. THE MAGICIANS
3. THE DEAD HAND
4. THE EMPEROR
5. THE WAR BEGINS
6. THE FAVORITE
7. BRIBERY
8. TO TRANTOR
9. ON TRANTOR
10. THE WAR ENDS
PART II THE MULE
11. BRIDE AND GROOM
12. CAPTAIN AND MAYOR
1 3. LIEUTENANT AND CLOWN
14. THE MUTANT
15. THE PSYCHOLOGIST
16. CONFERENCE
17. THE VISI-SONOR
1 8. FALL OF THE FOUNDATION
1 9. START OF THE SEARCH
20. CONSPIRATOR
21. INTERLUDE IN SPACE
22. DEATH ON NEOTRANTOR
23. THE RUINS OF TRANTOR
24. CONVERT
25. DEATH OF A PSYCHOLOGIST
26. END OF THE SEARCH
PROLOGUE
The Galactic Empire Was Falling.
It was a colossal Empire, stretching across millions of worlds from arm-end to arm-end of the
mighty multi-spiral that was the Milky Way. Its fall was colossal, too - and a long one, for it had
a long way to go.
It had been falling for centuries before one man became really aware of that fall. That man was
Hari Seldon, the man who represented the one spark of creative effort left among the gathering
decay. He developed and brought to its highest pitch the science of psychohistory.
Psychohistory dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in
their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser
science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could
be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.
Hari Seldon plotted the social and economic trends of the time, sighted along the curves and
foresaw the continuing and accelerating fall of civilization and the gap of thirty thousand years
that must elapse before a struggling new Empire could emerge from the ruins.
It was too late to stop that fall, but not too late to narrow the gap of barbarism. Seldon
established two Foundations at "opposite ends of the Galaxy" and their location was so
designed that in one short millennium events would knit and mesh so as to force out of them a
stronger, more permanent, more benevolent Second Empire.
Foundation (Gnome Press, 1951) has told the story of one of those Foundations during the first
two centuries of life.
It began as a settlement of physical scientists on Terminus, a planet at the extreme end of one
of the spiral arms of the Galaxy. Separated from the turmoil of the Empire, they worked as
compilers of a universal compendium of knowledge, the Encyclopedia Galactica, unaware of
the deeper role planned for them by the already-dead Seldon,
As the Empire rotted, the outer regions fell into the hands of independent "kings." The
Foundation was threatened by them. However, by playing one petty ruler against another,
under the leadership of their first mayor, Salvor Hardin, they maintained a precarious
independence. As sole possessors, of nuclear power among worlds which were losing their
sciences and falling back on coal and oil, they even established an ascendancy. The
Foundation became the "religious" center of the neighboring kingdoms.
Slowly, the Foundation developed a trading economy as the Encyclopedia receded into the
background. Their Traders, dealing in nuclear gadgets which not even the Empire in its heyday
could have duplicated for compactness, penetrated hundreds of light-years through the
Periphery.
Under Hober Mallow, the first of the Foundation's Merchant Princes, they developed the
techniques of economic warfare to the point of defeating the Republic of Korell, even though
that world was receiving support from one of the outer provinces of what was left of the Empire.
At the end of two hundred years, the Foundation was the most powerful state in the Galaxy,
except for the remains of the Empire, which, concentrated in the inner third of the Milky Way,
still controlled three quarters of the population and wealth of the Universe.
It seemed inevitable that the next danger the Foundation would have to face was the final lash
of the dying Empire.
The way must he cleared for the battle of Foundation and Empire.
PART I
THE GENERAL
1. SEARCH FOR MAGICIANS
BEL RIOSE .... In his relatively short career, Riose earned the title of "The Last of the Imperials''
and earned It well. A study of his campaigns reveals him to be the equal of Peurifoy in strategic
ability and his superior perhaps in his ability to handle men. That he was born in the days of the
decline of Empire made it all but impossible for him to equal Peurifoy's record as a conqueror.
Yet he had his chance when, the first of the Empire's generals to do so, he faced the
Foundation squarely....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA*
*AII quotations from the Encyclopedia Galactica here reproduced are taken from the 1 1 6th
Edition published in 1020 F.E. by the Encyclopedia Galactica Publishing Co., Terminus, with
permission of the publishers.
Bel Riose traveled without escort, which is not what court etiquette prescribes for the head of a
fleet stationed in a yet-sullen stellar system on the Marches of the Galactic Empire.
But Bel Riose was young and energetic - energetic enough to be sent as near the end of the
universe as possible by an unemotional and calculating court - and curious besides. Strange
and improbable tales fancifully-repeated by hundreds and murkily-known to thousands intrigued
the last faculty; the possibility of a military venture engaged the other two. The combination was
overpowering.
He was out of the dowdy ground-car he had appropriated and at the door of the fading mansion
that was his destination. He waited. The photonic eye that spanned the doorway was alive, but
when the door opened it was by hand.
Bel Riose smiled at the old man. "I am Riose-"
"I recognize you." The old man remained stiffly and unsurprised in his place. "Your business?"
Riose withdrew a step in a gesture of submission. "One of peace. If you are Ducem Barr, I ask
the favor of conversation."
Ducem Barr stepped aside and in the interior of the house the walls glowed into life, The
general entered into daylight.
He touched the wall of the study, then stared at his fingertips. "You have this on Siwenna?"
Barr smiled thinly. "Not elsewhere, I believe. I keep this in repair myself as well as I can. I must
apologize for your wait at the door. The automatic device registers the presence of a visitor but
will no longer open the door."
"Your repairs fall short?" The general's voice was faintly mocking.
"Parts are no longer available. If you will sit, sir. You drink tea?"
"On Siwenna? My good sir, it is socially impossible not to drink it here."
The old patrician retreated noiselessly with a slow bow that was part of the ceremonious legacy
left by the aristocracy of the last century's better days.
Riose looked after his host's departing figure, and his studied urbanity grew a bit uncertain at
the edges. His education had been purely military; his experience likewise. He had, as the
cliche, has it, faced death many times; but always death of a very familiar and tangible nature,
Consequently, there is no inconsistency in the fact that the idolized lion of the Twentieth Fleet
felt chilled in the suddenly musty atmosphere of an ancient room.
The general recognized the small black-ivroid boxes that lined the shelves to be books. Their
titles were unfamiliar. He guessed that the large structure at one end of the room was the
receiver that transmuted the books into sight-and-sound on demand. He had never seen one in
operation; but he had heard of them.
Once he had been told that long before, during the golden ages when the Empire had been
co-extensive with the entire Galaxy, nine houses out of every ten had such receivers - and
such rows of books.
But there were borders to watch now; books were for old men. And half the stories told about
the old days were mythical anyway. More than half.
The tea arrived, and Riose seated himself. Ducem Barr lifted his cup. "To your honor."
"Thank you. To yours."
Ducem Barr said deliberately, "You are said to be young. Thirty-five?"
"Near enough. Thirty-four."
"In that case," said Barr, with soft emphasis, "I could not begin better than by informing you
regretfully that I am not in the possession of love charms, potions, or philtres. Nor am I in the
least capable of influencing the favors of any young lady as may appeal to you."
"I have no need of artificial aids in that respect, sir." The complacency undeniably present in the
general's voice was stirred with amusement. "Do you receive many requests for such
commodities?"
"Enough. Unfortunately, an uninformed public tends to confuse scholarship with magicianry,
and love life seems to be that factor which requires the largest quantity of magical tinkering."
"And so would seem most natural. But I differ. I connect scholarship with nothing but the means
of answering difficult questions."
The Siwennian considered somberly, "You may be as wrong as they!"
"That may turn out or not." The young general set down his cup in its flaring sheath and it
refilled. He dropped the offered flavor-capsule into it with a small splash. "Tell me then,
patrician, who are the magicians? The real ones."
Barr seemed startled at a title long-unused. He said, "There are no magicians."
"But people speak of them. Siwenna crawls with the tales of them. There are cults being built
about them. There is some strange connection between it and those groups among your
countrymen who dream and drivel of ancient days and what they call liberty and autonomy.
Eventually the matter might become a danger to the State."
The old man shook his head. "Why ask me? Do you smell rebellion, with myself at the head?"
Riose shrugged, "Never. Never. Oh, it is not a thought completely ridiculous. Your father was
an exile in his day; you yourself a patriot and a chauvinist in yours. It is indelicate in me as a
guest to mention it, but my business here requires it. And yet a conspiracy now? I doubt it.
Siwenna has had the spirit beat out of it these three generations."
The old man replied with difficulty, "I shall be as indelicate a host as you a guest. I shall remind
you that once a viceroy thought as you did of the spiritless Siwennians. By the orders of that
viceroy my father became a fugitive pauper, my brothers martyrs, and my sister a suicide. Yet
that viceroy died a death sufficiently horrible at the hands of these same slavish Siwennians."
"Ah, yes, and there you touch nearly on something I could wish to say. For three years the
mysterious death of that viceroy has been no mystery to me. There was a young soldier of his
personal guard whose actions were of interest. You were that soldier, but there is no need of
details, I think."
Barr was quiet. "None. What do you propose?
"That you answer my questions."
"Not under threats. I am old enough for life not to mean particularly overmuch."
"My good sir, these are hard times," said Riose, with meaning, "and you have children and
friends. You have a country for which you have mouthed phrases of love and folly in the past.
Come, if I should decide to use force, my aim would not be so poor as to strike you."
Barr said coldly, "What do you want?"
Riose held the empty cup as he spoke. "Patrician, listen to me. These are days when the most
successful soldiers are those whose function is to lead the dress parades that wind through the
imperial palace grounds on feast days and to escort the sparkling pleasure ships that carry His
Imperial Splendor to the summer planets. I ... I am a failure. I am a failure at thirty-four, and I
shall stay a failure. Because, you see, I like to fight.
"That's why they sent me here. I'm too troublesome at court. I don't fit in with the etiquette. I
offend the dandies and the lord admirals, but I'm too good a leader of ships and men to be
disposed of shortly be being marooned in space. So Siwenna is the substitute. It's a frontier
world; a rebellious and a barren province. It is far away, far enough away to satisfy all.
"And so I moulder. There are no rebellions to stamp down, and the border viceroys do not
revolt lately, at least, not since His Imperial Majesty's late father of glorious memory made an
example of Mountel of Paramay."
"A strong Emperor," muttered Barr.
"Yes, and we need more of them. He is my master; remember that. These are his interests I
guard."
Barr shrugged unconcernedly. "How does all this relate to the subject?"
"I'll show you in two words. The magicians I've mentioned come from beyond-out there beyond
the frontier guards, where the stars are scattered thinly-"
"'Where the stars are scattered thinly,'" quoted Barr, '"And the cold of space seeps in."'
"Is that poetry?" Riose frowned. Verse seemed frivolous at the moment. "In any case, they're
from the Periphery - from the only quarter where I am free to fight for the glory of the Emperor."
"And thus serve His Imperial Majesty's interests and satisfy your own love of a good fight."
"Exactly. But I must know what I fight; and there you can help."
"How do you know?"
Riose nibbled casually at a cakelet. "Because for three years I have traced every rumor, every
myth, every breath concerning the magicians - and of all the library of information I have
gathered, only two isolated facts are unanimously agreed upon, and are hence certainly true.
The first is that the magicians come from the edge of the Galaxy opposite Siwenna; the second
is that your father once met a magician, alive and actual, and spoke with him."
The aged Siwennian stared unblinkingly, and Riose continued, "You had better tell me what
you know-"
Barr said thoughtfully, "It would be interesting to tell you certain things. It would be a
psychohistoric experiment of my own."
"What kind of experiment?"
"Psychohistoric." The old man had an unpleasant edge to his smile. Then, crisply, "You'd better
have more tea. I'm going to make a bit of a speech."
He leaned far back into the soft cushions of his chair. The wall-lights had softened to a
pink-ivory glow, which mellowed even the soldier's hard profile.
Ducem Barr began, "My own knowledge is the result of two accidents; the accidents of being
born the son of my father, and of being born the native of my country. It begins over forty years
ago, shortly after the great Massacre, when my father was a fugitive in the forests of the South,
while I was a gunner in the viceroy's personal fleet. This same viceroy, by the way, who had
ordered the Massacre, and who died such a cruel death thereafter."
Barr smiled grimly, and continued, "My father was a Patrician of the Empire and a Senator of
Siwenna. His name was Onum Barr."
Riose interrupted impatiently, "I know the circumstances of his exile very well. You needn't
elaborate upon it."
The Siwennian ignored him and proceeded without deflection. "During his exile a wanderer
came upon him; a merchant from the edge of the Galaxy; a young man who spoke a strange
accent, knew nothing of recent Imperial history, and who was protected by an individual
force-shield."
"An individual force-shield?" Riose glared. "You speak extravagance. What generator could be
powerful enough to condense a shield to the size of a single man? By the Great Galaxy, did he
carry five thousand myria-tons of nuclear power-source about with him on a little wheeled
gocart?"
Barr said quietly, "This is the magician of whom you hear whispers, stories and myths. The
name 'magician' is not lightly earned. He carried no generator large enough to be seen, but not
the heaviest weapon you can carry in your hand would have as much as creased the shield he
bore."
"Is this all the story there is? Are the magicians born of maunderings of an old man broken by
suffering and exile?"
"The story of the magicians antedated even my father, sir. And the proof is more concrete. After
leaving my father, this merchant that men call a magician visited a Tech-man at the city to
which my father had guided him, and there he left a shield-generator of the type he wore. That
generator was retrieved by my father after his return from exile upon the execution of the
bloody viceroy. It took a long time to find-
"The generator hangs on the wall behind you, sir. It does not work. It never worked but for the
first two days; but if you'll look at it, you will see that no one in the Empire ever designed it."
Bel Riose reached for the belt of linked metal that clung to the curved wall. It came away with a
little sucking noise as the tiny adhesion-field broke at the touch of his hand. The ellipsoid at the
apex of the belt held his attention. It was the size of a walnut.
"This-" he said.
"Was the generator," nodded Barr. "But it was the generator. The secret of its workings are
beyond discovery now. Sub-electronic investigations have shown it to be fused into a single
lump of metal and not all the most careful study of the diffraction patterns have sufficed to
distinguish the discrete parts that had existed before fusion."
"Then your 'proof still lingers on the frothy border of words backed by no concrete evidence."
Barr shrugged. "You have demanded my knowledge of me and threatened its extortion by
force. If you choose to meet it with skepticism, what is that to me? Do you want me to stop?"
"Go on!" said the general, harshly.
"I continued my father's researches after he died, and then the second accident I mentioned
came to help me, for Siwenna was well known to Hari Seldon."
"And who is Hari Seldon?"
"Hari Seldon was a scientist of the reign of the Emperor, Daluben IV. He was a psychohistorian;
the last and greatest of them all. He once visited Siwenna, when Siwenna was a great
commercial center, rich in the arts and sciences."
"Hmph," muttered Riose, sourly, "where is the stagnant planet that does not claim to have been
a land of overflowing wealth in older days?"
"The days I speak of are the days of two centuries ago, when the Emperor yet ruled to the
uttermost star; when Siwenna was a world of the interior and not a semi-barbarian border
province. In those days, Hari Seldon foresaw the decline of Imperial power and the eventual
barbarization of the entire Galaxy."
Riose laughed suddenly. "He foresaw that? Then he foresaw wrong, my good scientist. I
suppose you call yourself that. Why, the Empire is more powerful now than it has been in a
millennium. Your old eyes are blinded by the cold bleakness of the border. Come to the inner
worlds some day; come to the warmth and the wealth of the center."
The old man shook his head somberly. "Circulation ceases first at the outer edges. It will take a
while yet for the decay to reach the heart. That is, the apparent, obvious-to-all decay, as distinct
from the inner decay that is an old story of some fifteen centuries."
"And so this Hari Seldon foresaw a Galaxy of uniform barbarism," said Riose, good-humoredly.
"And what then, eh?"
So he established two foundations at the extreme opposing ends of the Galaxy - Foundations
of the best, and the youngest, and the strongest, there to breed, grow, and develop. The worlds
on which they were placed were chosen carefully; as were the times and the surroundings. All
was arranged in such a way that the future as foreseen by the unalterable mathematics of
psychohistory would involve their early isolation from the main body of Imperial civilization and
their gradual growth into the germs of the Second Galactic Empire - cutting an inevitable
barbarian interregnum from thirty thousand years to scarcely a single thousand."
"And where did you find out all this? You seem to know it in detail."
"I don't and never did," said the patrician with composure. "It is the painful result of the piecing
together of certain evidence discovered by my father and a little more found by myself. The
basis is flimsy and the superstructure has been romanticized into existence to fill the huge
gaps. But I am convinced that it is essentially true."
"You are easily convinced."
"Am I? It has taken forty years of research."
"Hmph. Forty years! I could settle the question in forty days. In fact, I believe I ought to. It would
be - different."
"And how would you do that?"
"In the obvious way. I could become an explorer. I could find this Foundation you speak of and
observe with my eyes. You say there are two?"
"The records speak of two. Supporting evidence has been found only for one, which is
understandable, for the other is at the extreme end of the long axis of the Galaxy."
"Well, we'll visit the near one." The general was on his feet, adjusting his belt.
"You know where to go?" asked Barr.
"In a way. In the records of the last viceroy but one, he whom you murdered so effectively,
there are suspicious tales of outer barbarians. In fact, one of his daughters was given in
marriage to a barbarian prince. I'll find my way."
Fie held out a hand. "I thank you for your hospitality."
Ducem Barr touched the hand with his fingers and bowed formally. "Your visit was a great
honor."
"As for the information you gave me," continued Bel Riose, "I'll know how to thank you for that
when I return."
Ducem Barr followed his guest submissively to the outer door and said quietly to the
disappearing ground-car, "And if you return."
2. THE MAGICIANS
FOUNDATION ... With forty years of expansion behind them, the Foundation faced the menace
of Riose. The epic days of Hardin and Mallow had gone and with them were gone a certain
hard daring and resolution....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
There were four men in the room, and the room was set apart where none could approach. The
four men looked at each other quickly, then lengthily at the table that separated them. There
were four bottles on the table and as many full glasses, but no one had touched them.
And then the man nearest the door stretched out an arm and drummed a slow, padding rhythm
on the table.
He said, "Are you going to sit and wonder forever? Does it matter who speaks first?"
"Speak you first, then," said the big man directly opposite. "You're the one who should be the
most worried."
Sennett Forell chuckled with noiseless nonhumor. "Because you think I'm the richest. Well - Or
is it that you expect me to continue as I have started. I don't suppose you forget that it was my
own Trade Fleet that captured this scout ship of theirs."
"You had the largest fleet," said a third, "and the best pilots; which is another way of saying you
are the richest. It was a fearful risk; and would have been greater for one of us."
Sennett Forell chuckled again. "There is a certain facility in risk-taking that I inherit from my
father. After all, the essential point in running a risk is that the returns justify it. As to which,
witness the fact that the enemy ship was isolated and captured without loss to ourselves or
warning to the others."
That Forell was a distant collateral relative of the late great Hober Mallow was recognized
openly throughout the Foundation. That he was Mallow's illegitimate son was accepted quietly
to just as wide an extent.
The fourth man blinked his little eyes stealthily. Words crept out from between thin lips. "It is
nothing to sleep over in fat triumph, this grasping of little ships. Most likely, it will but anger that
young man further."
"You think he needs motives?" questioned Forell, scornfully.
"I do, and this might, or will, save him the vexation of having to manufacture one." The fourth
man spoke slowly, "Hober Mallow worked otherwise. And Salvor Hardin. They let others take
the uncertain paths of force, while they maneuvered surely and quietly."
Forell shrugged. "This ship has proved its value. Motives are cheap and we have sold this one
at a profit." There was the satisfaction of the born Trader in that. He continued, "The young
man is of the old Empire."
"We knew that," said the second man, the big one, with rumbling discontent.
"We suspected that," corrected Forell, softly. "If a man comes with ships and wealth, with
overtures of friendliness, and with offers of trade, it is only sensible to refrain from antagonizing
him, until we are certain that the profitable mask is not a face after all. But now-"
There was a faint whining edge to the third man's voice as he spoke. "We might have been
even more careful. We might have found out first. We might have found out before allowing him
to leave. It would have been the truest wisdom."
"That has been discussed and disposed of," said Forell. Fie waved the subject aside with a
flatly final gesture.
"The government is soft," complained the third man. "The mayor is an idiot."
The fourth man looked at the other three in turn and removed the stub of a cigar from his
mouth. Fie dropped it casually into the slot at his right where it disappeared with a silent flash of
disruption.
Fie said sarcastically, "I trust the gentleman who last spoke is speaking through habit only. We
can afford to remember here that we are the government."
There was a murmur of agreement.
The fourth man's little eyes were on the table. "Then let us leave government policy alone. This
young man ... this stranger might have been a possible customer. There have been cases. All
three of you tried to butter him into an advance contract. We have an agreement - a
gentleman's agreement - against it, but you tried."
"So did you," growled the second man.
I know it," said the fourth, calmly.
"Then let's forget what we should have done earlier," interrupted Forell impatiently, "and
continue with what we should do now. In any case, what if we had imprisoned him, or killed
him, what then? We are not certain of his intentions even yet, and at the worst, we could not
destroy an Empire by snipping short one man's life. There might be navies upon navies waiting
just the other side of his nonreturn."
"Exactly," approved the fourth man. "Now what did you get out of your captured ship? I'm too
old for all this talking."
"It can be told in a few enough words," said Forell, grimly. "Fle's an Imperial general or
whatever rank corresponds to that over there. Fle's a young man who has proved his military
brilliance - so I am told - and who is the idol of his men. Quite a romantic career. The stories
they tell of him are no doubt half lies, but even so it makes him out to be a type of wonder
man."
"Who are the 'they'?" demanded the second man.
"The crew of the captured ship. Look, I have all their statements recorded on micro-film, which I
have in a secure place. Later on, if you wish, you can see them. You can talk to the men
yourselves, if you think it necessary. I've told you the essentials."
"How did you get it out of them? How do you know they're telling the truth?"
Forell frowned. "I wasn't gentle, good sir. I knocked them about, drugged them crazy, and used
the Probe unmercifully. They talked. You can believe them."
"In the old days," said the third man, with sudden irrelevance, "they would have used pure
psychology. Painless, you know, but very sure. No chance of deceit."
"Well, there is a good deal they had in the old days," said Forell, dryly. "These are the new
days."
"But," said the fourth man, "what did he want here, this general, this romantic wonder-man?"
There was a dogged, weary persistence about him.
Forell glanced at him sharply. "You think he confides the details of state policy to his crew?
They didn't know. There was nothing to get out of them in that respect, and I tried, Galaxy
knows."
"Which leaves us-"
"To draw our own conclusions, obviously." Forell's fingers were tapping quietly again. "The
young man is a military leader of the Empire, yet he played the pretense of being a minor
princeling of some scattered stars in an odd comer of the Periphery. That alone would assure
us that his real motives are such as it would not benefit him to have us know. Combine the
nature of his profession with the fact that the Empire has already subsidized one attack upon us
in my father's time, and the possibilities become ominous. That first attack failed. I doubt that
the Empire owes us love for that."
"There is nothing in your findings," questioned the fourth man guardedly, "that makes for
certainty? You are withholding nothing?"
Forell answered levelly, "I can't withhold anything. From here on there can be no question of
business rivalry. Unity is forced upon us."
"Patriotism?" There was a sneer in the third man's thin voice.
"Patriotism be damned," said Forell quietly. "Do you think I give two puffs of nuclear emanation
for the future Second Empire? Do you think I'd risk a single Trade mission to smooth its path?
But - do you suppose Imperial conquest will help my business or yours? If the Empire wins,
there will be a sufficient number of yearning carrion crows to crave the rewards of battle."
"And we're the rewards," added the fourth man, dryly.
The second man broke his silence suddenly, and shifted his bulk angrily, so that the chair
creaked under him. "But why talk of that. The Empire can't win, can it? There is Seldon's
assurance that we will form the Second Empire in the end. This is only another crisis. There
have been three before this."
"Only another crisis, yes!" Forell brooded. "But - in the case of the first two, we had Salvor
Hardin to guide us; in the third, there was Hober Mallow. Whom have we now?"
He looked at the others somberly and continued, "Seldon's rules of psychohistory on which it is
so comforting to rely probably have as one of the contributing variables, a certain normal
initiative on the part of the people of the Foundation themselves. Seldon's laws help those who
help themselves."
"The times make the man," said the third man. "There's another proverb for you."
"You can't count on that, not with absolute assurance," grunted Forell. "Now the way it seems
to me is this. If this is the fourth crisis, then Seldon has foreseen it. If he has, then it can be
beaten, and there should be a way of doing it.
"Now The Empire is stronger than we; it always has been. But this is the first time we are in
danger of its direct attack, so that strength becomes terribly menacing. If it can be beaten, it
must be once again as in all past crises by a method other than pure force. We must find the
weak side of our enemy and attack it there."
"And what is that weak side?" asked the fourth man. "Do you intend advancing a theory?"
"No. That is the point I'm leading up to. Our great leaders of the past always saw the weak
points of their enemies and aimed at that. But now-"
There was a helplessness in his voice, and for a moment none volunteered a comment.
Then the fourth man said, "We need spies."
Forell turned to him eagerly. "Right! I don't know when the Empire will attack. There may be
time."
"Hober Mallow himself entered the Imperial dominions," suggested the second man.
But Forell shook his head. "Nothing so direct. None of us are precisely youthful; and all of us
are rusty with red-tape and administrative detail. We need young men that are in the field
now-"
"The independent traders?" asked the fourth man.
And Forell nodded his, head and whispered, "If there is yet time-"
3. THE DEAD HAND
Bel Riose interrupted his annoyed stridings to look up hopefully when his aide entered. "Any
word of the Starlet ?"
"None. The scouting party has quartered space, but the instruments have detected nothing.
Commander Yume has reported that the Fleet is ready for an immediate attack in retaliation."
The general shook his head. "No, not for a patrol ship. Not yet. Tell him to double - Wait! I'll
write out the message. Have it coded and transmitted by tight beam."
He wrote as he talked and thrust the paper at the waiting officer. "Has the Siwennian arrived
yet?"
"Not yet."
"Well, see to it that he is brought in here as soon as he does arrive."
The aide saluted crisply and left. Riose resumed his caged stride.
When the door opened a second time, it was Ducem Barr that stood on the threshold. Slowly,
in the footsteps of the ushering aide, he stepped into the garish room whose ceiling was an
ornamented holographic model of the Galaxy, and in the center of which Bel Riose stood in
field uniform.
"Patrician, good day!" The general pushed forward a chair with his foot and gestured the aide
away with a "That door is to stay closed till I open it."
He stood before the Siwennian, legs apart, hand grasping wrist behind his back, balancing
himself slowly, thoughtfully, on the balls of his feet.
Then, harshly, "Patrician, are you a loyal subject of the Emperor?"
Barr, who had maintained an indifferent silence till then, wrinkled a noncommittal brow. "I have
no cause to love Imperial rule."
"Which is a long way from saying that you would be a traitor."
"True. But the mere act of not being a traitor is also a long way from agreeing to be an active
helper."
"Ordinarily also true. But to refuse your help at this point," said Riose, deliberately, "will be
considered treason and treated as such."
Barr's eyebrows drew together. "Save your verbal cudgels for your subordinates. A simple
statement of your needs and wants will suffice me here."
Riose sat down and crossed his legs. "Barr, we had an earlier discussion half a year ago."
"About your magicians?"
"Yes. You remember what I said I would do."
Barr nodded. His arms rested limply in his lap. "You were going to visit them in their haunts,
and you've been away these four months. Did you find them?"
"Find them? That I did," cried Riose. His lips were stiff as he spoke. It seemed to require effort
to refrain from grinding molars. "Patrician, they are not magicians; they are devils. It is as far
from belief as the outer galaxies from here. Conceive it! It is a world the size of a handkerchief,
of a fingernail; with resources so petty, power so minute, a population so microscopic as would
never suffice the most backward worlds of the dusty prefects of the Dark Stars. Yet with that, a
people so proud and ambitious as to dream quietly and methodically of Galactic rule.
"Why, they are so sure of themselves that they do not even hurry. They move slowly,
phlegmatically; they speak of necessary centuries. They swallow worlds at leisure; creep
through systems with dawdling complacence.
"And they succeed. There is no one to stop them. They have built up a filthy trading community
that curls its tentacles about the systems further than their toy ships dare reach. For parsecs,
their Traders - which is what their agents call themselves - penetrate."
Ducem Barr interrupted the angry flow. "How much of this information is definite; and how much
is simply fury?"
The soldier caught his breath and grew calmer. "My fury does not blind me. I tell you I was in
worlds nearer to Siwenna than to the Foundation, where the Empire was a myth of the
distance, and where Traders were living truths. We ourselves were mistaken for Traders."
"The Foundation itself told you they aimed at Galactic dominion?"
"Told me!" Riose was violent again. "It was not a matter of telling me. The officials said nothing.
They spoke business exclusively. But I spoke to ordinary men. I absorbed the ideas of the
common folk; their 'manifest destiny,' their calm acceptance of a great future. It is a thing that
can't be hidden; a universal optimism they don't even try to hide."
The Siwennian openly displayed a certain quiet satisfaction. "You will notice that so far it would
seem to bear out quite accurately my reconstruction of events from the paltry data on the
subject that I have gathered."
"It is no doubt," replied Riose with vexed sarcasm, "a tribute to your analytical powers. It is also
a hearty and bumptious commentary on the growing danger to the domains of His Imperial
Majesty."
Barr shrugged his unconcern, and Riose leaned forward suddenly, to seize the old man's
shoulders and stare with curious gentleness into his eyes.
He said, "Now, patrician, none of that. I have no desire to be barbaric. For my part, the legacy
of Siwennian hostility to the Imperium is an odious burden, and one which I would do
everything in my power to wipe out. But my province is the military and interference in civil
affairs is impossible. It would bring about my recall and ruin my usefulness at once. You see
that? I know you see that. Between yourself and myself then, let the atrocity of forty years ago
be repaid by your vengeance upon its author and so forgotten. I need your help. I frankly admit
it."
There was a world of urgency in the young man's voice, but Ducem Barr's head shook gently
and deliberately in a negative gesture.
Riose said pleadingly, "You don't understand, patrician, and I doubt my ability to make you. I
can't argue on your ground. You're the scholar, not I. But this I can tell you. Whatever you think
of the Empire, you will admit its great services. Its armed forces have committed isolated
crimes, but in the main they have been a force for peace and civilization. It was the Imperial
navy that created the Pax Imperium that ruled over all the Galaxy for thousands of years.
Contrast the millennia of peace under the Sun-and-Spaceship of the Empire with the millennia
of interstellar anarchy that preceded it. Consider the wars and devastations of those old days
and tell me if, with all its faults, the Empire is not worth preserving.
"Consider," he drove on forcefully, "to what the outer fringe of the Galaxy is reduced in these
days of their breakaway and independence, and ask yourself if for the sake of a petty revenge
you would reduce Siwenna from its position as a province under the protection of a mighty
Navy to a barbarian world in a barbarian Galaxy, all immersed in its fragmentary independence
and its common degradation and misery."
"Is it so bad - so soon?" murmured the Siwennian.
"No," admitted Riose. "We would be safe ourselves no doubt, were our lifetimes quadrupled.
But it is for the Empire I fight; that, and a military tradition which is something for myself alone,
and which I can not transfer to you. It is a military tradition built on the Imperial institution which
I serve."
"You are getting mystical, and I always find it difficult to penetrate another person's mysticism."
"No matter. You understand the danger of this Foundation."
"It was I who pointed out what you call the danger before ever you headed outward from
Siwenna."
"Then you realize that it must be stopped in embryo or perhaps not at all. You have known of
this Foundation before anyone had heard of it. You know more about it than anyone else in the
Empire. You probably know how it might best be attacked; and you can probably forewarn me
of its countermeasures. Come, let us be friends."
Ducem Barr rose. Fie said flatly, "Such help as I could give you means nothing. So I will make
you free of it in the face of your strenuous demand."
"I will be the judge of its meaning."
"No, I am serious. Not all the might of the Empire could avail to crush this pygmy world."
"Why not?" Bel Riose's eyes glistened fiercely. "No, stay where you are. I'll tell you when you
may leave. Why not? If you think I underestimate this enemy I have discovered, you are wrong.
Patrician," he spoke reluctantly, "I lost a ship on my return. I have no proof that it fell into the
hands of the Foundation; but it has not been located since and were it merely an accident, its
dead hulk should, certainly have been found along the route we took. It is not an important loss
- less than the tenth part of a fleabite, but it may mean that the Foundation has already opened
hostilities. Such eagerness and such disregard for consequences might mean secret forces of
which I know nothing. Can you help me then by answering a specific question? What is their
military power?"
"I haven't any notion."
"Then explain yourself on your own terms. Why do you say the Empire can not defeat this small
enemy?"
The Siwennian seated himself once more and looked away from Riose's fixed glare. Fie spoke
heavily, "Because I have faith in the principles of psychohistory. It is a strange science. It
reached mathematical maturity with one man, Hari Seldon, and died with him, for no man since
has been capable of manipulating its intricacies. But in that short period, it proved itself the
most powerful instrument ever invented for the study of humanity. Without pretending to predict
the actions of individual humans, it formulated definite laws capable of mathematical analysis
and extrapolation to govern and predict the mass action of human groups."
"So-"
"It was that psychohistory which Seldon and the group he worked with applied in full force to
the establishment of the Foundation. The place, time, and conditions all conspire
mathematically and so, inevitably, to the development of a Second Galactic Empire."
Riose's voice trembled with indignation. "You mean that this art of his predicts that I would
attack the Foundation and lose such and such a battle for such and such a reason? You are
trying to say that I am a silly robot following a predetermined course into destruction."
"No," replied the old patrician, sharply. "I have already said that the science had nothing to do
with individual actions. It is the vaster background that has been foreseen."
"Then we stand clasped tightly in the forcing hand of the Goddess of Historical Necessity."
"Of Psyc/7ohistorical Necessity," prompted Barr, softly.
"And if I exercise my prerogative of freewill? If I choose to attack next year, or not to attack at
all? Flow pliable is the Goddess? Flow resourceful?"
Barr shrugged. "Attack now or never; with a single ship, or all the force in the Empire; by
military force or economic pressure; by candid declaration of war or by treacherous ambush.
Do whatever you wish in your fullest exercise of freewill. You will still lose."
"Because of Hari Seldon's dead hand?"
"Because of the dead hand of the mathematics of human behavior that can neither be stopped,
swerved, nor delayed."
The two faced each other in deadlock, until the general stepped back.
Fie said simply, "I'll take that challenge. It's a dead hand against a living will."
4. THE EMPEROR
CLEON II commonly called "The Great. " The last strong Emperor of the First Empire, he is
important for the political and artistic renaissance that took place during his long reign. He is
best known to romance, however, for his connection with Bel Riose, and to the common man,
he is simply "Riose's Emperor. " It is important not to allow events of the last year of his reign to
overshadow forty years of...
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Cleon II was Lord of the Universe. Cleon II also suffered from a painful and undiagnosed
ailment. By the queer twists of human affairs, the two statements are not mutually exclusive,
nor even particularly incongruous. There have been a wearisomely large number of precedents
in history.
But Cleon II cared nothing for such precedents. To meditate upon a long list of similar cases
would not ameliorate personal suffering an electron's worth. It soothed him as little to think that
where his great-grandfather had been the pirate ruler of a dust-speck planet, he himself slept in
the pleasure palace of Ammenetik the Great, as heir of a line of Galactic rulers stretching
backward into a tenuous past. It was at present no source of comfort to him that the efforts of
his father had cleansed the realm of its leprous patches of rebellion and restored it to the peace
and unity it had enjoyed under Stanel VI; that, as a consequence, in the twenty-five years of his
reign, not one cloud of revolt had misted his burnished glory.
The Emperor of the Galaxy and the Lord of All whimpered as he lolled his head backward into
the invigorating plane of force about his pillows. It yielded in a softness that did not touch, and
at the pleasant tingle, Cleon relaxed a bit. He sat up with difficulty and stared morosely at the
distant walls of the grand chamber. It was a bad room to be alone in. It was too big. All the
rooms were too big.
But better to be alone during these crippling bouts than to endure the prinking of the courtiers,
their lavish sympathy, their soft, condescending dullness. Better to be alone than to watch
those insipid masks behind which spun the tortuous speculations on the chances of death and
the fortunes of the succession.
His thoughts hurried him. There were his three sons; three straight-backed youths full of
promise and virtue. Where did they disappear on these bad days? Waiting, no doubt. Each
watching the other; and all watching him.
He stirred uneasily. And now Brodrig craved audience. The low-born, faithful Brodrig; faithful
because he was hated with a unanimous and cordial hatred that was the only point of
agreement between the dozen cliques that divided his court.
Brodrig - the faithful favorite, who had to be faithful, since unless he owned the fastest
speed-ship in the Galaxy and took to it the day of the Emperor's death, it would be the
radiation-chamber the day after.
Cleon II touched the smooth knob on the arm of his great divan, and the huge door at the end
of the room dissolved to transparency.
Brodrig advanced along the crimson carpet, and knelt to kiss the Emperor's limp hand.
"Your health, sire?" asked the Privy Secretary in a low tone of becoming anxiety.
"I live," snapped the Emperor with exasperation, "if you can call it life where every scoundrel
who can read a book of medicine uses me as a blank and receptive field for his feeble
experiments. If there is a conceivable remedy, chemical, physical, or nuclear, which has not yet
been tried, why then, some learned babbler from the far comers of the realm will arrive
tomorrow to try it. And still another newly-discovered book, or forgery morelike, will be used as
authority.
"By my father's memory," he rumbled savagely, "it seems there is not a biped extant who can
study a disease before his eyes with those same eyes. There is not one who can count a
pulse-beat without a book of the ancients before him. I'm sick and they call it 'unknown.' The
fools! If in the course of millennia, human bodies learn new methods of falling askew, it remains
uncovered by the studies of the ancients and uncurable forevermore. The ancients should be
alive now, or I then."
The Emperor ran down to a low-breathed curse while Brodrig waited dutifully. Cleon II said
peevishly, "How many are waiting outside?"
He jerked his head in the direction of the door.
Brodrig said patiently, "The Great Hall holds the usual number."
"Well, let them wait. State matters occupy me. Have the Captain of the Guard announce it. Or
wait, forget the state matters. Just have it announced I hold no audience, and let the Captain of
the Guard look doleful. The jackals among them may betray themselves." The Emperor
sneered nastily.
"There is a rumor, sire," said Brodrig, smoothly, "that it is your heart that troubles you."
The Emperor's smile was little removed from the previous sneer. "It will hurt others more than
myself if any act prematurely on that rumor. But what is it you want. Let's have this over."
Brodrig rose from his kneeling posture at a gesture of permission and said, "It concerns
General Bel Riose, the Military Governor of Siwenna."
"Riose?" Cleon II frowned heavily. "I don't place him. Wait, is he the one who sent that quixotic
message some months back? Yes, I remember. He panted for permission to enter a career of
conquest for the glory of the Empire and Emperor."
"Exactly, sire."
The Emperor laughed shortly. "Did you think I had such generals left me, Brodrig? He seems to
be a curious atavism. What was the answer? I believe you took care of it."
"I did, sire. He was instructed to forward additional information and to take no steps involving
naval action without further orders from the Imperium."
"Hmp. Safe enough. Who is this Riose? Was he ever at court?"
Brodrig nodded and his mouth twisted ever so little. "He began his career as a cadet in the
Guards ten years back. He had part in that affair off the Lemul Cluster."
"The Lemul Cluster? You know, my memory isn't quite - Was that the time a young soldier
saved two ships of the line from a head-on collision by ... uh ... something or other?" He waved
a hand impatiently. "I don't remember the details. It was something heroic."
"Riose was that soldier. He received a promotion for it," Brodrig said dryly, "and an appointment
to field duty as captain of a ship."
"And now Military Governor of a border system and still young. Capable man, Brodrig!"
"Unsafe, sire. He lives in the past. He is a dreamer of ancient times, or rather, of the myths of
what ancient times used to be. Such men are harmless in themselves, but their queer lack of
realism makes them fools for others." He added, "His men, I understand, are completely under
his control. He is one of your popular generals."
"Is he?" the Emperor mused. "Well, come, Brodrig, I would not wish to be served entirely by
incompetents. They certainly set no enviable standard for faithfulness themselves."
"An incompetent traitor is no danger. It is rather the capable men who must be watched."
"You among them, Brodrig?" Cleon II laughed and then grimaced with pain. "Well, then, you
may forget the lecture for the while. What new development is there in the matter of this young
conqueror? I hope you haven't come merely to reminisce."
"Another message, sire, has been received from General Riose."
"Oh? And to what effect?"
"He has spied out the land of these barbarians and advocates an expedition in force. His
arguments are long and fairly tedious. It is not worth annoying Your Imperial Majesty with it at
present, during your indisposition. Particularly since it will be discussed at length during the
session of the Council of Lords." He glanced sidewise at the Emperor.
Cleon II frowned. "The Lords? Is it a question for them, Brodrig? It will mean further demands
for a broader interpretation of the Charter. It always comes to that."
"It can't be avoided, sire. It might have been better if your august father could have beaten
down the last rebellion without granting the Charter. But since it is here, we must endure it for
the while."
"You're right, I suppose. Then the Lords it must be. But why all this solemnity, man? It is, after
all, a minor point. Success on a remote border with limited troops is scarcely a state affair."
Brodrig smiled narrowly. He said coolly, "It is an affair of a romantic idiot; but even a romantic
idiot can be a deadly weapon when an unromantic rebel uses him as a tool. Sire, the man was
popular here and is popular there. He is young. If he annexes a vagrant barbarian planet or
two, he will become a conqueror. Now a young conqueror who has proven his ability to rouse
the enthusiasm of pilots, miners, tradesmen and suchlike rabble is dangerous at any time. Even
if he lacked the desire to do to you as your august father did to the usurper, Ricker, then one of
our loyal Lords of the Domain may decide to use him as his weapon."
Cleon II moved an arm hastily and stiffened with pain. Slowly he relaxed, but his smile was
weak, and his voice a whisper. "You are a valuable subject, Brodrig. You always suspect far
more than is necessary, and I have but to take half your suggested precautions to be utterly
safe. We'll put it up to the Lords. We shall see what they say and take our measure accordingly.
The young man, I suppose, has made no hostile moves yet."
"He report none. But already he asks for reinforcements."
"Reinforcements!" The Emperor's eyes narrowed with wonder. "What force has he?"
"Ten ships of the line, sire, with a full complement of auxiliary vessels. Two of the ships are
equipped with motors salvaged from the old Grand Fleet, and one has a battery of power
artillery from the same source. The other ships are new ones of the last fifty years, but are
serviceable, nevertheless."
"Ten ships would seem adequate for any reasonable undertaking. Why, with less than ten ships
my father won his first victories against the usurper. Who are these barbarians he's fighting?"
The Privy Secretary raised a pair of supercilious eyebrows. "He refers to them as 'the
Foundation.'"
"The Foundation? What is it?"
"There is no record of it, sire. I have searched the archives carefully. The area of the Galaxy
indicated falls within the ancient province of Anacreon, which two centuries since gave itself up
to brigandage, barbarism, and anarchy. There is no planet known as Foundation in the
province, however. There was a vague reference to a group of scientists sent to that province
just before its separation from our protection. They were to prepare an Encyclopedia." He
smiled thinly. "I believe they called it the Encyclopedia Foundation."
"Well," the Emperor considered it somberly, "that seems a tenuous connection to advance."
"I'm not advancing it, sire. No word was ever received from that expedition after the growth of
anarchy in that region. If their descendants still live and retain their name, then they have
reverted to barbarism most certainly."
"And so he wants reinforcements." The Emperor bent a fierce glance at his secretary. "This is
most peculiar; to propose to fight savages with ten ships and to ask for more before a blow is
struck. And yet I begin to remember this Riose; he was a handsome boy of loyal family.
Brodrig, there are complications in this that I don't penetrate. There may be more importance in
it than would seem."
His fingers played idly with the gleaming sheet that covered his stiffened legs. He said, "I need
a man out there; one with eyes, brains and loyalty. Brodrig-"
The secretary bent a submissive head. "And the ships, sire?"
"Not yet!" The Emperor moaned softly as he shifted his position in gentle stages. He pointed a
feeble finger, "Not till we know more. Convene the Council of Lords for this day week. It will be
a good opportunity for the new appropriation as well. I'll put that through or lives will end."
He leaned his aching head into the soothing tingle of the force-field pillow, "Go now, Brodrig,
and send in the doctor. He's the worst bumbler of the lot."
5. THE WAR BEGINS
From the radiating point of Siwenna, the forces of the Empire reached out cautiously into the
black unknown of the Periphery. Giant ships passed the vast distances that separated the
vagrant stars at the Galaxy's rim, and felt their way around the outermost edge of Foundation
influence.
Worlds isolated in their new barbarism of two centuries felt the sensation once again of Imperial
overlords upon their soil. Allegiance was sworn in the face of the massive artillery covering
capital cities.
Garrisons were left; garrisons of men in Imperial uniform with the Spaceship-and-Sun insignia
upon their shoulders. The old men took notice and remembered once again the forgotten tales
of their grandfathers' fathers of the times when the universe was big, and rich, and peaceful
and that same Spaceship-and-Sun ruled all.
Then the great ships passed on to weave their line of forward bases further around the
Foundation. And as each world was knotted into its proper place in the fabric, the report went
back to Bel Riose at the General Fleadquarters he had established on the rocky barrenness of
a wandering sunless planet.
Now Riose relaxed and smiled grimly at Ducem Barr. "Well, what do you think, patrician?"
"I? Of what value are my thoughts? I am not a military man." He took in with one wearily
distasteful glance the crowded disorder of the rock-bound room which had been carved out of
the wall of a cavern of artificial air, light, and heat which marked the single bubble of life in the
vastness of a bleak world.
"For the help I could give you," he muttered, "or would want to give you, you might return me to
Siwenna."
"Not yet. Not yet." The general turned his chair to the comer which held the huge,
brilliantly-transparent sphere that mapped the old Imperial prefect of Anacreon and its
neighboring sectors. "Later, when this is over, you will go back to your books and to more. I'll
see to it that the estates of your family are restored to you and to your children for the rest of
time."
"Thank you," said Barr, with faint irony, "but I lack your faith in the happy outcome of all this."
Riose laughed harshly, "Don't start your prophetic croakings again. This map speaks louder
than all your woeful theories." He caressed its curved invisible outline gently. "Can you read a
map in radial projection? You can? Well, here, see for yourself. The stars in gold represent the
Imperial territories. The red stars are those in subjection to the Foundation and the pink are
those which are probably within the economic sphere of influence. Now watch-"
Riose's hand covered a rounded knob, and slowly an area of hard, white pinpoints changed into
a deepening blue. Like an inverted cup they folded about the red and the pink.
"Those blue stars have been taken over by my forces," said Riose with quiet satisfaction, "and
they still advance. No opposition has appeared anywhere. The barbarians are quiet. And
particularly, no opposition has come from Foundation forces. They sleep peacefully and well."
"You spread your force thinly, don't you?" asked Barr.
"As a matter of fact," said Riose, "despite appearances, I don't. The key points which I garrison
and fortify are relatively few, but they are carefully chosen. The result is that the force
expended is small, but the strategic result great. There are many advantages, more than would
ever appear to anyone who hasn't made a careful study of spatial tactics, but it is apparent to
anyone, for instance, that I can base an attack from any point in an inclosing sphere, and that
when I am finished it will be impossible for the Foundation to attack at flank or rear. I shall have
no flank or rear with respect to them.
"This strategy of the Previous Enclosure has been tried before, notably in the campaigns of
Loris VI, some two thousand years ago, but always imperfectly; always with the knowledge and
attempted interference of the enemy. This is different."
"The ideal textbook case?" Barr's voice was languid and indifferent.
Riose was impatient, "You still think my forces will fail?"
"They must."
"You understand that there is no case in military history where an Enclosure has been
completed that the attacking forces have not eventually won, except where an outside Navy
exists in sufficient force to break the Enclosure."
"If you say so."
"And you still adhere to your faith."
"Yes."
Riose shrugged. "Then do so."
Barr allowed the angry silence to continue for a moment, then asked quietly, "Flave you
received an answer from the Emperor?"
Riose removed a cigarette from a wall container behind his head, placed a filter tip between his
lips and puffed it aflame carefully. Fie said, "You mean my request for reinforcements? It came,
but that's all. Just the answer."
"No ships."
"None. I half-expected that. Frankly, patrician, I should never have allowed myself to be
stampeded by your theories into requesting them in the first place. It puts me in a false light."
"Does it?"
"Definitely. Ships are at a premium. The civil wars of the last two centuries have smashed up
more than half of the Grand Fleet and what's left is in pretty shaky condition. You know it isn't
as if the ships we build these days are worth anything. I don't think there's a man in the Galaxy
today who can build a first-rate hypernuclear motor."
"I knew that," said the Siwennian. His eyes were thoughtful and introspective. "I didn't know that
yoi/knew it. So his Imperial Majesty can spare no ships. Psychohistory could have predicted
that; in fact, it probably did. I should say that Hari Seldon's dead hand wins the opening round."
Riose answered sharply, "I have enough ships as it is. Your Seldon wins nothing. Should the
situation turn more serious, then more ships will be available. As yet, the Emperor does not
know all the story."
"Indeed? What haven't you told him?"
"Obviously - your theories." Riose looked sardonic. "The story is, with all respect to you,
inherently improbable. If developments warrant; if events supply me with proof, then, but only
then, would I make out the case of mortal danger.
"And in addition," Riose drove on, casually, "the story, unbolstered by fact, has a flavor of lese
majeste that could scarcely be pleasant to His Imperial Majesty."
The old patrician smiled. "You mean that telling him his august throne is in danger of
subversion by a parcel of ragged barbarians from the ends of the universe is not a warning to
be believed or appreciated. Then you expect nothing from him."
"Unless you count a special envoy as something."
"And why a special envoy?"
"It's an old custom. A direct representative of the crown is present on every military campaign
which is under government auspices."
"Really? Why?"
"It's a method of preserving the symbol of personal Imperial leadership in all campaigns. It's
gained a secondary function of insuring the fidelity of generals. It doesn't always succeed in
that respect."
"You'll find that inconvenient, general. Extraneous authority, I mean."
"I don't doubt that," Riose reddened faintly, "but it can't be helped-"
The receiver at the general's hand glowed warmly, and with an unobtrusive jar, the cylindered
communication popped into its slot. Riose unrolled it, "Good! This is it!"
Ducem Barr raised a mildly questioning eyebrow.
Riose said, "You know we've captured one of these Trader people. Alive - and with his ship
intact."
"I've heard talk of it."
"Well, they've just brought him in, and we'll have him here in a minute. You keep your seat,
patrician. I want you here when I'm questioning him. It's why I asked you here today in the first
place. You may understand him where I might miss important points."
The door signal sounded and a touch of the general's toe swung the door wide. The man who
stood on the threshold was tall and bearded, wore a short coat of a soft, leathery plastic, with
an attached hood shoved back on his neck. His hands were free, and if he noticed the men
about him were armed, he did not trouble to indicate it.
He stepped in casually, and looked about with calculating eyes. He favored the general with a
rudimentary wave of the hand and a half nod.
"Your name?" demanded Riose, crisply.
"Lathan Devers." The trader hooked his thumbs into his wide and gaudy belt. "Are you the boss
here?"
"You are a trader of the Foundation?"
"That's right. Listen, if you're the boss, you'd better tell your hired men here to lay off my cargo."
The general raised his head and regarded the prisoner coldly. "Answer questions. Do not
volunteer orders."
"All right. I'm agreeable. But one of your boys blasted a two-foot hole in his chest already, by
sticking his fingers where he wasn't supposed to."
Riose shifted his gaze to the lieutenant in charge. "Is this man telling the truth? Your report,
Vrank, had it that no lives were lost."
"None were, sir," the lieutenant spoke stiffly, apprehensively, "at the time. There was later some
disposition to search the ship, there having arisen a rumor that a woman was aboard. Instead,
sir, many instruments of unknown nature were located, instruments which the prisoner claims
to be his stock in trade. One of them flashed on handling, and the soldier holding it died."
The general turned back to the trader. "Does your ship carry nuclear explosives?"
"Galaxy, no. What for? That fool grabbed a nuclear puncher, wrong end forward and set at
maximum dispersion. You're not supposed to do that. Might as well point a neut-gun at your
head. I'd have stopped him, if five men weren't sitting on my chest."
Riose gestured at the waiting guard, "You go. The captured ship is to he sealed against all
intrusion. Sit down, Devers."
The trader did so, in the spot indicated, and withstood stolidly the hard scrutiny of the Imperial
general and the curious glance of the Siwennian patrician.
Riose said, "You're a sensible man, Devers."
"Thank you. Are you impressed by my face, or do you want something? Tell you what, though.
I'm a good business man."
"It's about the same thing. You surrendered your ship when you might have decided to waste
our ammunition and have yourself blown to electron-dust. It could result in good treatment for
you, if you continue that sort of outlook on life."
"Good treatment is what I mostly crave, boss."
"Good, and co-operation is what I mostly crave." Riose smiled, and said in a low aside to
Ducem Barr, "I hope the word 'crave' means what I think it does. Did you ever hear such a
barbarous jargon?"
Devers said blandly, "Right. I check you. But what kind of co-operation are you talking about,
boss? To tell you straight, I don't know where I stand." He looked about him, "Where's this
place, for instance, and - what's the idea?"
"Ah, I've neglected the other half of the introductions. I apologize." Riose was in good humor.
"That gentleman is Ducem Barr, Patrician of the Empire. I am Bel Riose, Peer of the Empire,
and General of the Third Class in the armed forces of His Imperial Majesty."
The trader's jaw slackened. Then, "The Empire? I mean the old Empire they taught us about at
school? Huh! Funny! I always had the sort of notion that it didn't exist any more."
"Look about you. It does," said Riose grimly.
"Might have known it though," and Lathan Devers pointed his beard at the ceiling. "That was a
mightily polished-looking set of craft that took my tub. No kingdom of the Periphery could have
turned them out." His brow furrowed. "So what's the game, boss? Or do I call you general?"
"Me game is war."
"Empire versus Foundation, that it?"
"Right."
"Why?"
"I think you know why."
The trader stared sharply and shook his head.
Riose let the other deliberate, then said softly, "I'm sure you know why."
Lathan Devers muttered, "Warm here," and stood up to remove his hooded jacket. Then he sat
down again and stretched his legs out before him.
"You know," he said, comfortably, "I figure you're thinking I ought to jump up with a whoop and
lay about me. I can catch you before you could move if I choose my time, and this old fellow
who sits there and doesn't say anything couldn't do much to stop me."
"But you won't," said Riose, confidently.
"I won't," agreed Devers, amiably. "First off, killing you wouldn't stop the war, I suppose. There
are more generals where you came from."
"Very accurately calculated."
"Besides which, I'd probably be slammed down about two seconds after I got you, and killed
fast, or maybe slow, depending. But I'd be killed, and I never like to count on that when I'm
making plans. It doesn't pay off."
"I said you were a sensible man."
"But there's one thing I would like, boss. I'd like you to tell me what you mean when you say I
know why you're jumping us. I don't; and guessing games bother me no end."
"Yes? Ever hear of Hari Seldon?"
"No. I said I don't like guessing games."
Riose flicked a side glance at Ducem Barr who smiled with a narrow gentleness and resumed
his inwardly-dreaming expression.
Riose said with a grimace, "Don't you play games, Devers. There is a tradition, or a fable, or
sober history - I don't care what - upon your Foundation, that eventually you will found the
Second Empire. I know quite a detailed version of Hari Seldon's psychohistorical claptrap, and
your eventual plans of aggression against the Empire."
"That so?" Devers nodded thoughtfully. "And who told you all that?"
"Does that matter?" said Riose with dangerous smoothness. "You're here to question nothing. I
want what you know about the Seldon Fable."
"But if it's a Fable-"
"Don't play with words, Devers."
"I'm not. In fact, I'll give it to you straight. You know all I know about it. It's silly stuff, half-baked.
Every world has its yams; you can't keep it away from them. Yes, I've heard that sort of talk;
Seldon, Second Empire, and so on. They put kids to sleep at night with the stuff. The young
squirts curl up in the spare rooms with their pocket projectors and suck up Seldon thrillers. But
it's strictly non-adult. Nonintelligent adult, anyway." The trader shook his head.
The Imperial general's eyes were dark. "Is that really so? You waste your lies, man. I've been
on the planet, Terminus. I know your Foundation. I've looked it in the face."
"And you ask me? Me, when I haven't kept foot on it for two months at a piece in ten years. You
are wasting your time. But go ahead with your war, if it's fables you're after."
And Barr spoke for the first time, mildly, "You are so confident then that the Foundation will
win?"
The trader turned. He flushed faintly and an old scar on one temple showed whitely, "Hm-m-m,
the silent partner. How'd you squeeze that out of what I said, doc?"
Riose nodded very slightly at Barr, and the Siwennian continued in a low voice, "Because the
notion would bother you if you thought your world might lose this war, and suffer the bitter
reapings of defeat, I know. My world once did, and still does."
Lathan Devers fumbled his beard, looked from one of his opponents to the other, then laughed
shortly. "Does he always talk like that, boss? Listen," he grew serious, "what's defeat? I've seen
wars and I've seen defeats. What if the winner does take over? Who's bothered? Me? Guys like
me?" He shook his head in derision.
"Get this," the trader spoke forcefully and earnestly, "there are five or six fat slobs who usually
run an average planet. They get the rabbit punch, but I'm not losing peace of mind over them.
See. The people? The ordinary run of guys? Sure, some get killed, and the rest pay extra taxes
for a while. But it settles itself out; it runs itself down. And then it's the old situation again with a
different five or six."
Ducem Barr's nostrils flared, and the tendons of his old right hand jerked; but he said nothing.
Lathan Devers' eyes were on him. They missed nothing. He said, "Look. I spend my life in
space for my five-and-dime gadgets and my beer-and-pretzel kickback from the Combines.
There's fat fellows back there," his thumb jerked over his shoulder and back, "that sit home and
collect my year's income every minute - out of skimmings from me and more like me. Suppose
you run the Foundation. You'll still need us. You'll need us more than ever the Combines do -
because you'd not know your way around, and we could bring in the hard cash. We'd make a
better deal with the Empire. Yes, we would; and I'm a man of business. If it adds up to a plus
mark, I'm for it."
And he stared at the two with sardonic belligerence.
The silence remained unbroken for minutes, and then a cylinder rattled into its slot. The general
flipped it open, glanced at the neat printing and in-circuited the visuals with a sweep.
"Prepare plan indicating position of each ship in action. Await orders on full-armed defensive."
He reached for his cape. As he fastened it about his shoulders, he whispered in a stiff-lipped
monotone to Barr, "I'm leaving this man to you. I'll expect results. This is war and I can be cruel
to failures. Remember!" He left, with a salute to both.
Lathan Devers looked after him, "Well, something's hit him where it hurts. What goes on?"
"A battle, obviously," said Barr, gruffly. "The forces of the Foundation are coming out for their
first battle. You'd better come along."
There were armed soldiers in the room. Their bearing was respectful and their faces were hard.
Devers followed the proud old Siwennian patriarch out of the room.
The room to which they were led was smaller, barer. It contained two beds, a visi-screen, and
shower and sanitary facilities. The soldiers marched out, and the thick door boomed hollowly
shut.
" Hmp ?' Devers stared disapprovingly about. "This looks permanent."
"It is," said Barr, shortly. The old Siwennian turned his back.
The trader said irritably, "What's your game, doc?"
"I have no game. You're in my charge, that's all."
The trader rose and advanced. His bulk towered over the unmoving patrician. "Yes? But you're
in this cell with me and when you were marched here the guns were pointed just as hard at you
as at me. Listen, you were all boiled up about my notions on the subject of war and peace."
He waited fruitlessly, "All fight, let me ask you something. You said your country was licked
once. By whom? Comet people from the outer nebulae?"
Barr looked up. "By the Empire."
"That so? Then what are you doing here?"
Barr maintained an eloquent silence.
The trader thrust out a lower lip and nodded his head slowly. He slipped off the flat-linked
bracelet that hugged his fight wrist and held it out. "What do you think of that?" He wore the
mate to it on his left.
The Siwennian took the ornament. He responded slowly to the trader's gesture and put it on.
The odd tingling at the wrist passed away quickly.
Devers' voice changed at once. "Right, doc, you've got the action now. Just speak casually. If
this room is wired, they won't get a thing. That's a Field Distorter you've got there; genuine
Mallow design. Sells for twenty-five credits on any world from here to the outer rim. You get it
free. Hold your lips still when you talk and take it easy. You've got to get the trick of it."
Ducem Barr was suddenly weary. The trader's boring eyes were luminous and urging. He felt
unequal to their demands.
Barr said, "What do you want?" The words slurred from between unmoving lips.
"I've told you. You make mouth noises like what we call a patriot. Yet your own world has been
mashed up by the Empire, and here you are playing ball with the Empire's fair-haired general.
Doesn't make sense, does it?"
Barr said, "I have done my part. A conquering Imperial viceroy is dead because of me."
"That so? Recently?"
"Forty years ago."
"Forty ... years ... ago!" The words seemed to have meaning to the trader. He frowned, "That's
a long time to live on memories. Does that young squirt in the general's uniform know about it?"
Barr nodded.
Devers' eyes were dark with thought. "You want the Empire to win?"
And the old Siwennian patrician broke out in sudden deep anger, "May the Empire and all its
works perish in universal catastrophe. All Siwenna prays that daily. I had brothers once, a
sister, a father. But I have children now, grandchildren. The general knows where to find them."
Devers waited.
Barr continued in a whisper, "But that would not stop me if the results in view warranted the
risk. They would know how to die."
The trader said gently, "You killed a viceroy once, huh? You know, I recognize a few things. We
once had a mayor, Hober Mallow his name was. He visited Siwenna; that's your world, isn't it?
He met a man named Barr."
Ducem Barr stared hard, suspiciously. "What do you know of this?"
"What every trader on the Foundation knows. You might be a smart old fellow put in here to get
on my right side. Sure, they'd point guns at you, and you'd hate the Empire and be all-out for its
smashing. Then I'd fall all over you and pour out my heart to you, and wouldn't the general be
pleased. There's not much chance of that, doc.
"But just the same I'd like to have you prove that you're the son of Onum Barr of Siwenna - the
sixth and youngest who escaped the massacre."
Ducem Barr's hand shook as he opened the flat metal box in a wall recess. The metal object he
withdrew clanked softly as he thrust it into the trader's hands. "Look at that," he said.
Devers stared. He held the swollen central link of the chain close to his eyes and swore softly.
"That's Mallow's monogram, or I'm a space-struck rookie, and the design is fifty years old if it's
a day."
He looked up and smiled.
"Shake, doc. A man-sized nuclear shield is all the proof I need," and he held out his large hand.
6. THE FAVORITE
The tiny ships had appeared out of the vacant depths and darted into the midst of the Armada.
Without a shot or a burst of energy, they weaved through the ship-swollen area, then blasted
on and out, while the Imperial wagons turned after them like lumbering beasts. There were two
noiseless flares that pinpointed space as two of the tiny gnats shriveled in atomic disintegration,
and the rest were gone.
The great ships searched, then returned to their original task, and world by world, the great web
of the Enclosure continued.
Brodrig's uniform was stately; carefully tailored and as carefully worn. His walk through the
gardens of the obscure planet Wanda, now temporary Imperial headquarters, was leisurely; his
expression was somber.
Bel Riose walked with him, his field uniform open at the collar, and doleful in its monotonous
gray-black.
Riose indicated the smooth black bench under the fragrant tree-fern whose large spatulate
leaves lifted flatly against the white sun. "See that, sir. It is a relic of the Imperium. The
ornamented benches, built for lovers, linger on, fresh and useful, while the factories and the
palaces collapse into unremembered ruin."
He seated himself, while Cleon ll's Privy Secretary stood erect before him and clipped the
leaves above neatly with precise swings of his ivory staff.
Riose crossed his legs and offered a cigarette to the other. He fingered one himself as he
spoke, "It is what one would expect from the enlightened wisdom of His Imperial Majesty to
send so competent an observer as yourself. It relieves any anxiety I might have felt that the
press of more important and more immediate business might perhaps force into the shadows a
small campaign on the Periphery."
"The eyes of the Emperor are everywhere," said Brodrig, mechanically. "We do not
underestimate the importance of the campaign; yet still it would seem that too great an
emphasis is being placed upon its difficulty. Surely their little ships are no such barrier that we
must move through the intricate preliminary maneuver of an Enclosure."
Riose flushed, but he maintained his equilibrium. "I can not risk the lives of my men, who are
few enough, or the destruction of my ships which are irreplaceable, by a too-rash attack. The
establishment of an Enclosure will quarter my casualties in the ultimate attack, howsoever
difficult it be. The military reasons for that I took the liberty to explain yesterday."
"Well, well, I am not a military man. In this case, you assure me that what seems patently and
obviously right is, in reality, wrong. We will allow that. Yet your caution shoots far beyond that.
In your second communication, you requested reinforcements. And these, against an enemy
poor, small, and barbarous, with whom you have had not one' skirmish at the time. To desire
more forces under the circumstances would savor almost of incapacity or worse, had not your
earlier career given sufficient proof of your boldness and imagination."
"I thank you," said the general, coldly, "but I would remind you that there is a difference
between boldness and blindness. There is a place for a decisive gamble when you know your
enemy and can calculate the risks at least roughly; but to move at all against an unknown
enemy is boldness in itself. You might as well ask why the same man sprints safely across an
obstacle course in the day, and falls over the furniture in his room at night."
Brodrig swept away the other's words with a neat flirt of the fingers. "Dramatic, but not
satisfactory. You have been to this barbarian world yourself. You have in addition this enemy
prisoner you coddle, this trader. Between yourself and the prisoner you are not in a night fog."
"No? I pray you to remember that a world which has developed in isolation for two centuries
can not be interpreted to the point of intelligent attack by a month's visit. I am a soldier, not a
cleft-chinned, barrel-chested hero of a subetheric trimensional thriller. Nor can a single
prisoner, and one who is an obscure member of an economic group which has no close
connection with the enemy world introduce me to all the inner secrets of enemy strategy."
"You have questioned him?"
"I have."
Well?
"It has been useful, but not vitally so. His ship is tiny, of no account. He sells little toys which
are amusing if nothing else. I have a few of the cleverest which I intend sending to the Emperor
as curiosities. Naturally, there is a good deal about the ship and its workings which I do not
understand, but then I am not a tech-man."
"But you have among you those who are," pointed out Brodrig.
"I, too, am aware of that," replied the general in faintly caustic tones. "But the fools have far to
go before they could meet my needs. I have already sent for clever men who can understand
the workings of the odd nuclear field-circuits the ship contains. I have received no answer."
"Men of that type can not be spared, general. Surely, there must be one man of your vast
province who understands nucleics."
"Were there such a one, I would have him heal the limping, invalid motors that power two of my
small fleet of ships. Two ships of my meager ten that can not fight a major battle for lack of
sufficient power supply. One fifth of my force condemned to the carrion activity of consolidating
positions behind the lines."
The secretary's fingers fluttered impatiently. "Your position is not unique in that respect,
general. The Emperor has similar troubles."
The general threw away his shredded, never-lit cigarette, lit another, and shrugged. "Well, it is
beside the immediate point, this lack of first-class tech-men. Except that I might have made
more progress with my prisoner were my Psychic Probe in proper order."
The secretary's eyebrows lifted. "You have a Probe?"
"An old one. A superannuated one which fails me the one time I needed it. I set it up during the
prisoner's sleep, and received nothing. So much for the Probe. I have tried it on my own men
and the reaction is quite proper, but again there is not one among my staff of tech-men who
can tell me why it fails upon the prisoner. Ducem Barr, who is a theoretician of parts, though no
mechanic, says the psychic structure of the prisoner may be unaffected by the Probe since
from childhood he has been subjected to alien environments and neural stimuli. I don't know.
But he may yet be useful. I save him in that hope."
Brodrig leaned on his staff. A shall see if a specialist is available in the capital. In the
meanwhile, what of this other man you just mentioned, this Siwennian? You keep too many
enemies in your good graces."
"He knows the enemy. He, too, I keep for future reference and the help he may afford me."
"But he is a Siwennian and the son of a proscribed rebel."
"He is old and powerless, and his family acts as hostage."
"I see. Yet I think that I should speak to this trader, myself."
"Certainly."
"Alone," the secretary added coldly, making his point.
"Certainly," repeated Riose, blandly. "As a loyal subject of the Emperor, I accept his personal
representative as my superior. However, since the trader is at the permanent base, you will
have to leave the front areas at an interesting moment."
"Yes? Interesting in what way?"
"Interesting in that the Enclosure is complete today. Interesting in that within the week, the
Twentieth Fleet of the Border advances inward towards the core of resistance." Riose smiled
and turned away.
In a vague way, Brodrig felt punctured.
7. BRIBERY
Sergeant Mori Luk made an ideal soldier of the ranks. He came from the huge agricultural
planets of the Pleiades where only army life could break the bond to the soil and the unavailing
life of drudgery; and he was typical of that background. Unimaginative enough to face danger
without fear, he was strong and agile enough to face it successfully. He accepted orders
instantly, drove the men under him unbendingly and adored his general unswervingly.
And yet with that, he was of a sunny nature. If he killed a man in the line of duty without a scrap
of hesitation, it was also without a scrap of animosity.
That Sergeant Luk should signal at the door before entering was further a sign of tact, for he
would have been perfectly within his rights to enter without signaling.
The two within looked up from their evening meal and one reached out with his foot to cut off
the cracked voice which rattled out of the battered pocket-transmitter with bright liveliness.
"More books?" asked Lathan Devers.
The sergeant held out the tightly-wound cylinder of film and scratched his neck. "It belongs to
Engineer Orre, but he'll have to have it back. He's going to send it to his kids, you know, like
what you might call a souvenir, you know."
Ducem Barr turned the cylinder in his hands with interest. "And where did the engineer get it?
He hasn't a transmitter also, has he?"
The sergeant shook his head emphatically. He pointed to the knocked-about remnant at the
foot of the bed. "That's the only one in the place. This fellow, Orre, now, he got that book from
one of these pig-pen worlds out here we captured. They had it in a big building by itself and he
had to kill a few of the natives that tried to stop him from taking it."
He looked at it appraisingly. "It makes a good souvenir - for kids."
He paused, then said stealthily, "There's big news floating about, by the way. It's only
scuttlebutt, but even so, it's too good to keep. The general did it again." And he nodded slowly,
gravely.
"That so?" said Devers. "And what did he do?"
"Finished the Enclosure, that's all." The sergeant chuckled with a fatherly pride. "Isn't he the
corker, though? Didn't he work it fine? One of the fellows who's strong on fancy talk, says it
went as smooth and even as the music of the spheres, whatever they are."
"The big offensive starts now?" asked Barr, mildly.
"Hope so," was the boisterous response. "I want to get back on my ship now that my arm is in
one piece again. I'm tired of sitting on my scupper out here."
"So am I," muttered Devers, suddenly and savagely. There was a bit of underlip caught in his
teeth, and he worried it.
The sergeant looked at him doubtfully, and said, "I'd better go now. The captain's round is due
and I'd just as soon he didn't catch me in here."
He paused at the door. "By the way, sir," he said with sudden, awkward shyness to the trader,
"I heard from my wife. She says that little freezer you gave me to send her works fine. It doesn't
cost her anything, and she just about keeps a month's supply of food froze up complete. I
appreciate it."
"It's all right. Forget it."
The great door moved noiselessly shut behind the grinning sergeant.
Ducem Barr got out of his chair. "Well, he gives us a fair return for the freezer. Let's take a look
at this new book. Ahh, the title is gone."
He unrolled a yard or so of the film and looked through at the light. Then he murmured, "Well,
skewer me through the scupper, as the sergeant says. This is 'The Garden of Summa,'
Devers."
"That so?" said the trader, without interest. He shoved aside what was left of his dinner. "Sit
down, Barr. Listening to this old-time literature isn't doing me any good. You heard what the
sergeant said?"
"Yes, I did. What of it?"
"The offensive will start. And we sit here!"
"Where do you want to sit?"
"You know what I mean. There's no use just waiting."
"Isn't there?" Barr was carefully removing the old film from the transmitter and installing the
new. "You told me a good deal of Foundation history in the last month, and it seems that the
great leaders of past crises did precious little more than sit - and wait."
"Ah, Barr, but they knew where they were going."
"Did they? I suppose they said they did when it was over, and for all I know maybe they did. But
there's no proof that things would not have worked out as well or better if they had not known
where they were going. The deeper economic and sociological forces aren't directed by
individual men."
Devers sneered. "No way of telling that things wouldn't have worked out worse, either. You're
arguing tail-end backwards." His eyes were brooding. "You know, suppose I blasted him?"
"Whom? Riose?"
"Yes."
Barr sighed. His aging eyes were troubled with a reflection of the long past. "Assassination isn't
the way out, Devers. I once tried it, under provocation, when I was twenty - but it solved
nothing. I removed a villain from Siwenna, but not the Imperial yoke; and it was the Imperial
yoke and not the villain that mattered."
"But Riose is not just a villain, doc. He's the whole blamed army. It would fall apart without him.
They hang on him like babies. The sergeant out there slobbers every time he mentions him."
"Even so. There are other armies and other leaders. You must go deeper. There is this Brodrig,
for instance - no one more than he has the ear of the Emperor. He could demand hundreds of
ships where Riose must struggle with ten. I know him by reputation."
"That so? What about him?" The trader's eyes lost in frustration what they gained in sharp
interest.
"You want a pocket outline? He's a low-born rascal who has by unfailing flattery tickled the
whims of the Emperor. He's well-hated by the court aristocracy, vermin themselves, because
he can lay claim to neither family nor humility. He is the Emperor's adviser in all things, and the
Emperor's too in the worst things. He is faithless by choice but loyal by necessity. There is not a
man in the Empire as subtle in villainy or as crude in his pleasures. And they say there is no
way to the Emperor's favor but through him; and no way to his, but through infamy."
"Wow!" Devers pulled thoughtfully at his neatly trimmed beard. "And he's the old boy the
Emperor sent out here to keep an eye on Riose. Do you know I have an idea?"
"I do now."
"Suppose this Brodrig takes a dislike to our young Army's Delight?"
"He probably has already. He's not noted for a capacity for liking."
"Suppose it gets really bad. The Emperor might hear about it, and Riose might be in trouble."
"Uh-huh. Quite likely. But how do you propose to get that to happen?"
"I don't know. I suppose he could be bribed?"
The patrician laughed gently. "Yes, in a way, but not in the manner you bribed the sergeant -
not with a pocket freezer. And even if you reach his scale, it wouldn't be worth it. There's
probably no one so easily bribed, but he lacks even the fundamental honesty of honorable
corruption. He doesn't stay bribed; not for any sum. Think of something else."
Devers swung a leg over his knee and his toe nodded quickly and restlessly. "It's the first hint,
though-"
He stopped; the door signal was flashing once again, and the sergeant was on the threshold
once more. He was excited, and his broad face was red and unsmiling.
"Sir," he began, in an agitated attempt at deference, "I am very thankful for the freezer, and you
have always spoken to me very fine, although I am only the son of a farmer and you are great
lords."
His Pleiades accent had grown thick, almost too much so for easy comprehension; and with
excitement, his lumpish peasant derivation wiped out completely the soldierly bearing so long
and so painfully cultivated.
Barr said softly, "What is it, sergeant?"
"Lord Brodrig is coming to see you. Tomorrow! I know, because the captain told me to have my
men ready for dress review tomorrow for ... for him. I thought - I might warn you."
Barr said, "Thank you, sergeant, we appreciate that. But it's all right, man; no need for-"
But the look on Sergeant Luk's face was now unmistakably one of fear. He spoke in a rough
whisper, "You don't hear the stories the men tell about him. He has sold himself to the space
fiend. No, don't laugh. There are most terrible tales told about him. They say he has men with
blast-guns who follow him everywhere, and when he wants pleasure, he just tells them to blast
down anyone they meet. And they do - and he laughs. They say even the Emperor is in terror
of him, and that he forces the Emperor to raise taxes and won't let him listen to the complaints
of the people.
"And he hates the general, that's what they say. They say he would like to kill the general,
because the general is so great and wise. But he can't because our general is a match for
anyone and he knows Lord Brodrig is a bad 'un."
The sergeant blinked; smiled in a sudden incongruous shyness at his own outburst; and
backed toward the door. He nodded his head, jerkily. "You mind my words. Watch him."
He ducked out.
And Devers looked up, hard-eyed. "This breaks things our way, doesn't it, doc?"
"It depends," said Barr, dryly, "on Brodrig, doesn't it?"
But Devers was thinking, not listening.
He was thinking hard.
Lord Brodrig ducked his head as he stepped into the cramped living quarters of the trading
ship, and his two armed guards followed quickly, with bared guns and the professionally hard
scowls of the hired bravos.
The Privy Secretary had little of the look of the lost soul about him just then. If the space fiend
had bought him, he had left no visible mark of possession. Rather might Brodrig have been
considered a breath of court-fashion come to enliven the hard, bare ugliness of an army base.
The stiff, tight lines of his sheened and immaculate costume gave him the illusion of height,
from the very top of which his cold, emotionless eyes stared down the declivity of a long nose
at the trader. The mother-of-pearl ruches at his wrists fluttered filmily as he brought his ivory
stick to the ground before him and leaned upon it daintily.
"No," he said, with a little gesture, "you remain here. Forget your toys; I am not interested in
them."
He drew forth a chair, dusted it carefully with the iridescent square of fabric attached to the top
of his white stick, and seated himself. Devers glanced towards the mate to the chair, but
Brodrig said lazily, "You will stand in the presence of a Peer of the Realm."
He smiled.
Devers shrugged. "If you're not interested in my stock in trade, what am I here for?"
The Privy Secretary waited coldly, and Devers added a slow, "Sir."
"For privacy," said the secretary. "Now is it likely that I would come two hundred parsecs
through space to inspect trinkets? It's you I want to see." He extracted a small pink tablet from
an engraved box and placed it delicately between his teeth. He sucked it slowly and
appreciatively.
"For instance," he said, "who are you? Are you really a citizen of this barbarian world that is
creating all this fury of military frenzy?"
Devers nodded gravely.
"And you were really captured by him after the beginning of this squabble he calls a war. I am
referring to our young general."
Devers nodded again.
"So! Very well, my worthy Outlander. I see your fluency of speech is at a minimum. I shall
smooth the way for you. It seems that our general here is fighting an apparently meaningless
war with frightful transports of energy - and this over a forsaken fleabite of a world at the end of
nowhere, which to a logical man would not seem worth a single blast of a single gun. Yet the
general is not illogical. On the contrary, I would say he was extremely intelligent. Do you follow
me?"
"Can't say I do, sir."
The secretary inspected his fingernails and said, "Listen further, then. The general would not
waste his men and ships on a sterile feat of glory. I know he talks of glory and of Imperial
honor, but it is quite obvious that the affectation of being one of the insufferable old demigods
of the Heroic Age won't wash. There is something more than glory hereand he does take queer,
unnecessary care of you. Now if you were my prisoner and told me as little of use as you have
our general, I would slit open your abdomen and strangle you with your own intestines."
Devers remained wooden. His eyes moved slightly, first to one of the secretary's bully-boys,
and then to the other. They were ready; eagerly ready.
The secretary smiled. "Well, now, you're a silent devil. According to the general, even a Psychic
Probe made no impression, and that was a mistake on his part, by the way, for it convinced me
that our young military whizz-bang was lying." He seemed in high humor.
"My honest tradesman," he said, "I have a Psychic Probe of my own, one that ought to suit you
peculiarly well. You see this-"
And between thumb and forefinger, held negligently, were intricately designed, pink-and-yellow
rectangles which were most definitely obvious in identity.
Devers said so. "It looks like cash," he said.
"Cash it is - and the best cash of the Empire, for it is backed by my estates, which are more
extensive than the Emperor's own. A hundred thousand credits. All here! Between two fingers!
Yours!"
"For what, sir? I am a good trader, but all trades go in both directions."
"For what? For the truth! What is the general after? Why is he fighting this war?"
Lathan Devers sighed, and smoothed his beard thoughtfully.
"What he's after?" His eyes were following the motions of the secretary's hands as he counted
the money slowly, bill by bill. "In a word, the Empire."
"Hmp. How ordinary! It always comes to that in the end. But how? What is the road that leads
from the Galaxy's edge to the peak of Empire so broadly and invitingly?"
"The Foundation," said Devers, bitterly, "has secrets. They have books, old books - so old that
the language they are in is only known to a few of the top men. But the secrets are shrouded in
ritual and religion, and none may use them. I tried and now I am here - and there is a death
sentence waiting for me, there."
"I see. And these old secrets? Come, for one hundred thousand I deserve the intimate details."
"The transmutation of elements," said Devers, shortly.
The secretary's eyes narrowed and lost some of their detachment. "I have been told that
practical transmutation is impossible by the laws of nucleics."
"So it is, if nuclear forces are used. But the ancients were smart boys. There are sources of
power greater than the nuclei and more fundamental. If the Foundation used those sources as I
suggested-"
Devers felt a soft, creeping sensation in his stomach. The bait was dangling; the fish was
nosing it.
The secretary said suddenly, "Continue. The general, I am sure, is aware of a this. But what
does he intend doing once he finishes this opera-bouffe affair?"
Devers kept his voice rock-steady. "With transmutation he controls the economy of the whole
set-up of your Empire. Mineral holdings won't be worth a sneeze when Riose can make
tungsten out of aluminum and iridium out of iron. An entire production system based on the
scarcity of certain elements and the abundance of others is thrown completely out of whack.
There'll be the greatest disjointment the Empire has ever seen, and only Riose will be able to
stop it. Anc/ there is the question of this new power I mentioned, the use of which won't give
Riose religious heebies.
"There's nothing that can stop him now. He's got the Foundation by the back of the neck, and
once he's finished with it, he'll be Emperor in two years."
"So." Brodrig laughed lightly. "Iridium out of iron, that's what you said, isn't it? Come, I'll tell you
a state secret. Do you know that the Foundation has already been in communication with the
general?"
Devers' back stiffened.
"You look surprised. Why not? It seems logical now. They offered him a hundred tons of iridium
a year to make peace. A hundred tons of iron converted to iridium in violation of their religious
principles to save their necks. Fair enough, but no wonder our rigidly incorruptible general
refused - when he can have the iridium and the Empire as well. And poor Cleon called him his
one honest general. My bewhiskered merchant, you have earned your money."
He tossed it, and Devers scrambled after the flying bills.
Lord Brodrig stopped at the door and turned. "One reminder, trader. My playmates with the
guns here have neither middle ears, tongues, education, nor intelligence. They can neither
hear, speak, write, nor even make sense to a Psychic Probe. But they are very expert at
interesting executions. I have bought you, man, at one hundred thousand credits. You will be
good and worthy merchandise. Should you forget that you are bought at any time and attempt
to ... say ... repeat our conversation to Riose, you will be executed. But executed my way."
And in that delicate face there were sudden hard lines of eager cruelty that changed the studied
smile into a red-lipped snarl. For one fleeting second, Devers saw that space fiend who had
bought his buyer, look out of his buyer's eyes.
Silently, he preceded the two thrusting blast-guns of Brodrig's "playmates" to his quarters.
And to Ducem Barr's question, he said with brooding satisfaction, "No, that's the queerest part
of it. He bribed me.
Two months of difficult war had left their mark on Bel Riose. There was heavy-handed gravity
about him; and he was short-tempered.
It was with impatience that he addressed the worshiping Sergeant Luk. "Wait outside, soldier,
and conduct these men back to their quarters when I am through. No one is to enter until I call.
No one at all, you understand."
The sergeant saluted himself stiffly out of the room, and Riose with muttered disgust scooped
up the waiting papers on his desk, threw them into the top drawer and slammed it shut.
"Take seats," he said shortly, to the waiting two. "I haven't much time. Strictly speaking, I
shouldn't be here at all, but it is necessary to see you."
He turned to Ducem Barr, whose long fingers were caressing with interest the crystal cube in
which was set the simulacrum of the lined, austere face of His Imperial Majesty, Cleon II.
"In the first place, patrician," said the general, "your Seldon is losing. To be sure, he battles
well, for these men of the Foundation swarm like senseless bees and fight like madmen. Every
planet is defended viciously, and once taken, every planet heaves so with rebellion it is as
much trouble to hold as to conquer. But they are taken, and they are held. Your Seldon is
losing."
"But he has not yet lost," murmured Barr politely.
"The Foundation itself retains less optimism. They offer me millions in order that I may not put
this Seldon to the final test."
"So rumor goes."
"Ah, is rumor preceding me? Does it prate also of the latest?"
"What is the latest?"
"Why, that Lord Brodrig, the darling of the Emperor, is now second in command at his own
request."
Devers spoke for the first time. "At his own request, boss? How come? Or are you growing to
like the fellow?" He chuckled.
Riose said, calmly, "No, can't say I do. It's just that he bought the office at what I considered a
fair and adequate price."
"Such as?"
"Such as a request to the Emperor for reinforcements."
Devers' contemptuous smile broadened. "'He has communicated with the Emperor, huh? And I
take it, boss, you're just waiting for these reinforcements, but they'll come any day. Right?"
"Wrong! They have already come. Five ships of the line; smooth and strong, with a personal
message of congratulations from the Emperor, and more ships on the way. What's wrong,
trader?" he asked, sardonically.
Devers spoke through suddenly frozen lips. "Nothing!"
Riose strode out from behind his desk and faced the trader, hand on the butt of his blast-gun.
"I say, what's wrong, trader? The news would seem to disturb you. Surely, you have no sudden
birth of interest in the Foundation."
"I haven't."
"Yes - there are queer points about you."
"That so, boss?" Devers smiled tightly, and balled the fists in his pockets. "Just you line them
up and I'll knock them down for you."
"Here they are. You were caught easily. You surrendered at first blow with a burnt-out shield.
You're quite ready to desert your world, and that without a price. Interesting, all this, isn't it?"
"I crave to be on the winning side, boss. I'm a sensible man; you called me that yourself."
Riose said with tight throatiness, "Granted! Yet no trader since has been captured. No trade
ship but has had the speed to escape at choice. No trade ship but has had a screen that could
take all the beating a light cruiser could give it, should it choose to fight. And no trader but has
fought to death when occasion warranted. Traders have been traced as the leaders and
instigators of the guerilla warfare on occupied planets and of the flying raids in occupied space.
"Are you the only sensible man then? You neither fight nor flee, but turn traitor without urging.
You are unique, amazingly unique - in fact, suspiciously unique."
Devers said softly, "I take your meaning, but you have nothing on me. I've been here now six
months, and I've been a good boy."
"So you have, and I have repaid you by good treatment. I have left your ship undisturbed and
treated you with every consideration. Yet you fall short. Freely offered information, for instance,
on your gadgets might have been helpful. The atomic principles on which they are built would
seem to be used in some of the Foundation's nastiest weapons. Right?"
"I am only a trader," said Devers, "and not one of these bigwig technicians. I sell the stuff; I
don't make it."
"Well, that will be seen shortly. It is what I came here for. For instance, your ship will be
searched for a personal force-shield. You have never worn one; yet all soldiers of the
Foundation do. It will be significant evidence that there is information you do not choose to give
me. Right?"
There was no answer. He continued, "And there will be more direct evidence. I have brought
with me the Psychic Probe. It failed once before, but contact with the enemy is a liberal
education."
His voice was smoothly threatening and Devers felt the gun thrust hard in his midriff - the
general's gun, hitherto in its holster.
The general said quietly, "You will remove your wristband and any other metal ornament you
wear and give them to me. Slowly! Atomic fields can be distorted, you see, and Psychic Probes
might probe only into static. That's right.. I'll take it."
The receiver on the general's desk was glowing and a message capsule clicked into the slot,
near which Barr stood and still held the trimensional Imperial bust.
Riose stepped behind his desk, with his blast-gun held ready. He said to Barr, "You too,
patrician. Your wristband condemns you. You have been helpful earlier, however, and I am not
vindictive, but I shall judge the fate of your behostaged family by the results of the Psychic
Probe."
And as Riose leaned over to take out the message capsule, Barr lifted the crystal-enveloped
bust of Cleon and quietly and methodically brought it down upon the general's head.
It happened too suddenly for Devers to grasp. It was as if a sudden demon had grown into the
old man.
"Out!" said Barr, in a tooth-clenched whisper. "Quickly!" He seized Riose's dropped blaster and
buried it in his blouse.
Sergeant Luk turned as they emerged from the narrowest possible crack of the door.
Barr said easily, "Lead on, sergeant!"
Devers closed the door behind him.
Sergeant Luk led in silence to their quarters, and then, with the briefest pause, continued
onward, for there was the nudge of a blast-gun muzzle in his ribs, and a hard voice in his ears
which said, "To the trade ship."
Devers stepped forward to open the air lock, and Barr said, "Stand where you are, Luk. You've
been a decent man, and we're not going to kill you."
But the sergeant recognized the monogram on the gun. He cried in choked fury, "You've killed
the general."
With a wild, incoherent yell, he charged blindly upon the blasting fury of the gun and collapsed
in blasted ruin.
The trade ship was rising above the dead planet before the signal lights began their eerie blink
and against the creamy cobweb of the great Lens in the sky which was the Galaxy, other black
forms rose.
Devers said grimly, "Hold tight, Barr - and let's see if they've got a ship that can match my
speed."
He knew they hadn't!
And once in open space, the trader's voice seemed lost and dead as he said, "The line I fed
Brodrig was a little too good. It seems as if he's thrown in with the general."
Swiftly they raced into the depths of the star-mass that was the Galaxy.
8. TO TRANTOR
Devers bent over the little dead globe, watching for a tiny sign of life. The directional control
was slowly and thoroughly sieving space with its jabbing tight sheaf of signals.
Barr watched patiently from his seat on the low cot in the comer, He asked, "No more signs of
them?"
"The Empire boys? No." The trader growled the words with evident impatience. "We lost the
scuppers long ago. Space! With the blind jumps we took through hyperspace, it's lucky we
didn't land up in a sun's belly. They couldn't have followed us even if they outranqed us, which
they didn't."
He sat back and loosened his collar with a jerk. "I don't know what those Empire boys have
done here. I think some of the gaps are out of alignment."
"I take it, then, you're trying to get to the Foundation."
"I'm calling the Association - or trying to."
"The Association? Who are they?"
"Association of Independent Traders. Never heard of it, huh? Well, you're not alone. We haven't
made our splash yet!"
For a while there was a silence that centered about the unresponsive Reception Indicator, and
Barr said, "Are you within range?"
"I don't know. I haven't but a small notion where we are, going by dead reckoning. That's why I
have to use directional control. It could take years, you know."
"Might it?"
Barr pointed; and Devers jumped and adjusted his earphones. Within the little murky sphere
there was a tiny glowing whiteness.
For half an hour, Devers nursed the fragile, groping thread of communication that reached
through hyperspace to connect two points that laggard light would take five hundred years to
bind together.
Then he sat back, hopelessly. He looked up, and shoved the earphones back.
"Let's eat, doc. There's a needle-shower you can use if you want to, but go easy on the hot
water."
He squatted before one of the cabinets that lined one wall and felt through the contents. "You're
not a vegetarian, I hope?"
Barr said, "I'm omnivorous. But what about the Association. Have you lost them?"
"Looks so. It was extreme range, a little too extreme. Doesn't matter, though. I got all that
counted."
He straightened, and placed the two metal containers upon the table. "Just give it five minutes,
doc, then slit it open by pushing the contact. It'll be plate, food, and fork - sort of handy for
when you're in a hurry, if you're not interested in such incidentals as napkins. I suppose you
want to know what I got out of the Association."
"If it isn't a secret."
Devers shook his head. "Not to you. What Riose said was true."
"About the offer of tribute?"
"Uh-huh. They offered it, and had it refused. Things are bad. There's fighting in the outer suns
of Loris."
"Loris is close to the Foundation?"
"Huh? Oh, you wouldn't know. It's one of the original Four Kingdoms. You might call it part of
the inner line of defense. That's not the worst. They've been fighting large ships previously
never encountered. Which means Riose wasn't giving us the works. He has received more
ships. Brodrig has switched sides, and I have messed things up."
His eyes were bleak as he joined the food-container contact-points and watched it fall open
neatly. The stewlike dish steamed its aroma through the room. Ducem Barr was already eating.
"So much," said Barr, "for improvisations, then. We can do nothing here; we can not cut
through the Imperial lines to return to the Foundation; we can do nothing but that which is most
sensible - to wait patiently. However, if Riose has reached the inner line I trust the wait will not
be too long."
And Devers put down his fork. "Wait, is it?" he snarled, glowering. "That's all right for you.
You've got nothing at stake."
"Haven't I?" Barr smiled thinly.
"No. In fact, I'll tell you." Devers' irritation skimmed the surface. "I'm tired of looking at this whole
business as if it were an interesting something-or-other on a microscope slide. I've got friends
somewhere out there, dying; and a whole world out there, my home, dying also. You're an
outsider. You don't know."
"I have seen friends die." The old man's hands were limp in his lap and his eyes were closed.
"Are you married?"
Devers said, "Traders don't marry."
"Well, I have two sons and a nephew. They have been warned, but - for reasons - they could
take no action. Our escape means their death. My daughter and my two grandchildren have, I
hope, left the planet safety before this, but even excluding them, I have already risked and lost
more than you."
Devers was morosely savage. "I know. But that was a matter of choice. You might have played
ball with Riose. I never asked you to-"
Barr shook his head. "It was not a matter of choice, Devers. Make your conscience free, I didn't
risk my sons for you. I co-operated with Riose as long as I dared. But there was the Psychic
Probe."
The Siwennian patrician opened his eyes and they were sharp with pain. "Riose came to me
once; it was over a year ago. He spoke of a cult centering about the magicians, but missed the
truth. It is not quite a cult. You see, it is forty years now that Siwenna has been gripped in the
same unbearable vise that threatens your world. Five revolts have been ground out. Then I
discovered the ancient records of Hari Seldon - and now this 'cult' waits.
"It waits for the coming of the 'magicians' and for that day it is ready. My sons are leaders of
those who wait. It is that secret which is in my mind and which the Probe must never touch.
And so they must die as hostages; for the alternative is their death as rebels and half of
Siwenna with them. You see, I had no choice! And I am no outsider."
Devers' eyes fell, and Barr continued softly, "It is on a Foundation victory that Siwenna's hopes
depend. It is for a Foundation victory that my sons are sacrificed. And Hari Seldon does not
pre-calculate the inevitable salvation of Siwenna as he does that of the Foundation. I have no
certainty for my people - only hope."
"But you are still satisfied to wait. Even with the Imperial Navy at Loris."
"I would wait, in perfect confidence," said Barr, simply, "if they had landed on the planet,
Terminus, itself."
The trader frowned hopelessly. "I don't know. It can't really work like that; not just like magic.
Psychohistory or not, they're terribly strong, and we're weak. What can Setdon do about it?"
"There's nothing to do. It's all already done. It's proceeding now. Because you don't hear the
wheels turning and the gongs beating doesn't mean it's any the less certain."
"Maybe; but I wish you had cracked Riose's skull for keeps. He's more the enemy than all his
army."
"Cracked his skull? With Brodrig his second in command?" Barr's face sharpened with hate. "All
Siwenna would have been my hostage. Brodrig has proven his worth long since. There exists a
world which five years ago lost one male in every ten - and simply for failure to meet
outstanding taxes. This same Brodrig was the tax-collector. No, Riose may live. His
punishments are mercy in comparison."
"But six months, six months, in the enemy Base, with nothing to show for it." Devers' strong
hands clasped each other tautly, so that his knuckles cracked. "Nothing to show for it!"
"Well, now, wait. You remind me-" Barr fumbled in his pouch. "You might want to count this."
And he tossed the small sphere of metal on the table.
Devers snatched it. "What is it?"
"The message capsule. The one that Riose received just before I jacked him. Does that count
as something?"
"I don't know. Depends on what's in it!" Devers sat down and turned it over carefully in his
hand.
When Barr stepped from his cold shower and, gratefully, into the mild warm current of the air
dryer, he found Devers silent and absorbed at the workbench.
The Siwennian slapped his body with a sharp rhythm and spoke above the punctuating sounds.
"What are you doing?"
Devers looked up. Droplets of perspiration glittered in his beard. "I'm going to open this
capsule."
"Can you open it without Riose's personal characteristic?" There was mild surprise in the
Siwennian's voice.
"If I can't, I'll resign from the Association and never skipper a ship for what's left of my life. I've
got a three-way electronic analysis of the interior now, and I've got little jiggers that the Empire
never heard of, especially made for jimmying capsules. I've been a burglar before this, y'know.
A trader has to be something of everything."
He bent low over the little sphere, and a small flat instrument probed delicately and sparked
redly at each fleeting contact.
He said, "This capsule is a crude job, anyway. These Imperial boys are no shakes at this small
work. I can see that. Ever see a Foundation capsule? It's half the size and impervious to
electronic analysis in the first place."
And then he was rigid, the shoulder muscles beneath his tunic tautening visibly. His tiny probe
pressed slowly-
It was noiseless when it came, but Devers; relaxed and sighed. In his hand was the shining
sphere with its message unrolled like a parchment tongue.
"It's from Brodrig," he said. Then, with contempt, "The message medium is permanent. In a
Foundation capsule, the message would be oxidized to gas within the minute."
But Ducem Barr waved him silent. He read the message quickly.
FROM: AMMEL BRODRIG, ENVOY EXTRAORDINARY OF HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY, PRIVY
SECRETARY OF THE COUNCIL, AND PEER OF THE REALM.
TO: BEL RIOSE, MILITARY GOVERNOR OF SIWENNA. GENERAL OF THE IMPERIAL
FORCES, AND PEER OF THE REALM. I GREET YOU.
PLANET #1 1 20 NO LONGER RESISTS. THE PLANS OF OFFENSE AS OUTLINED
CONTINUE SMOOTHLY. THE ENEMY WEAKENS VISIBLY AND THE ULTIMATE ENDS IN
VIEW WILL SURELY BE GAINED.
Barr raised his head from the almost microscopic print and cried bitterly, "The fool! The
forsaken blasted fop! That a. message?"
"Huh?" said Devers. He was vaguely disappointed.
"It says nothing," ground out Barr. "Our lick-spittle courtier is playing at general now. With Riose
away, he is the field commander and must sooth his paltry spirit by spewing out his pompous
reports concerning military affairs he has nothing to do with. 'So-and-so planet no longer
resists.' 'The offensive moves on.' 'The enemy weakens.' The vacuum-headed peacock."
"Well, now, wait a minute. Hold on-"
"Throw it away." The old man turned away in mortification. "The Galaxy knows I never expected
it to be world-shakingly important, but in wartime it is reasonable to assume that even the most
routine order left undelivered might hamper military movements and lead to complications later.
It's why I snatched it. But this! Better to have left it. It would have wasted a minute of Riose's
time that will now be put to more constructive use."
But Devers had arisen. "Will you hold on and stop throwing your weight around? For Seldon's
sake-"
He held out the sliver of message before Barr's nose, "Now read that again. What does he
mean by 'ultimate ends in view'?"
"The conquest of the Foundation. Well?"
"Yes? And maybe he means the conquest of the Empire. You know he believes that to be the
ultimate end."
"And if he does?"
"If he does!" Devers' one-sided smile was lost in his beard. "Why, watch then, and I'll show
you."
With one finger the lavishly monogrammed sheet of message-parchment was thrust back into
its slot. With a soft twang, it disappeared and the globe was a smooth, unbroken whole again.
Somewhere inside was the tiny oiled whir of the controls as they lost their setting by random
movements.
"Now there is no known way of opening this capsule without knowledge of Riose's personal
characteristic, is there?"
"To the Empire, no," said Barr.
"Then the evidence it contains is unknown to us and absolutely authentic."
"To the Empire, yes," said Barr.
"And the Emperor can open it, can't he? Personal Characteristics of Government officials must
be on file. We keep records of OL/r officials at the Foundation."
"At the Imperial capital as well," agreed Barr.
"Then when you, a Siwennian patrician and Peer of the Realm, tell this Cleon, this Emperor,
that his favorite tame-parrot and his shiniest general are getting together to knock him over,
and hand him the capsule as evidence, what will he think Brodrig's 'ultimate ends' are?"
Barr sat down weakly. "Wait, I don't follow you." He stroked one thin cheek, and said, "You're
not really serious, are you?"
"I am." Devers was angrily excited. "Listen, nine out of the last ten Emperors got their throats
cut, or their gizzards blasted out by one or another of their generals with bigtime notions in their
heads. You told me that yourself more than once. Old man Emperor would believe us so fast it
would make Riose's head swim."
Barr muttered feebly, "He is serious, For the Galaxy's sake, man, you can't beat a Seldon crisis
by a far-fetched, impractical, storybook scheme like that. Suppose you had never got hold of
the capsule. Suppose Brodrig hadn't used the word 'ultimate.' Seldon doesn't depend on wild
luck."
"If wild luck comes our way, there's no law says Seldon can't take advantage of it."
"Certainly. But ... but," Barr stopped, then spoke calmly but with visible restraint. "Look, in the
first place, how will you get to the planet Trantor? You don't know its location in space, and I
certainly don't remember the co-ordinates, to say nothing of the ephemerae. You don't even
know your own position in space."
"You can't get lost in space," grinned Devers. He was at the controls already. "Down we go to
the nearest planet, and back we come with complete bearings and the best navigation charts
Brodrig's hundred thousand smackers can buy."
"And a blaster in our belly. Our descriptions are probably in every planet in this quarter of the
Empire."
"Doc," said Devers, patiently, "don't be a hick tom the sticks. Riose said my ship surrendered
too easily and, brother, he wasn't kidding. This ship has enough fire-power and enough juice in
its shield to hold off anything we're Rely to meet this deep inside the frontier. And we have
personal shields, too. The Empire boys never found them, you know, but they weren't meant to
be found."
"All fight," said Barr, "all right. Suppose yourself on Trantor. How do you see the Emperor then?
You think he keeps office hours?"
"Suppose we worry about that on Trantor," said Devers.
And Barr muttered helplessly, "All right again. I've wanted to see Trantor before I die for half a
century now. Have your way."
The hypernuclear motor was cut in. The lights flickered and there was the slight internal wrench
that marked the shift into hyperspace.
9. ON TRANTOR
The stars were as thick as weeds in an unkempt field, and for the first time, Lathan Devers
found the figures to the right of the decimal point of prime importance in calculating the cuts
through the hyper-regions. There was a claustrophobic sensation about the necessity for leaps
of not more than a light-year. There was a frightening harshness about a sky which glittered
unbrokenly in every direction. It was being lost in a sea of radiation.
And in the center of an open cluster of ten thousand stars, whose light tore to shreds the feebly
encircling darkness, there circled the huge Imperial planet, Trantor.
But it was more than a planet; it was the living pulse beat of an Empire of twenty million stellar
systems. It had only one, function, administration; one purpose, government; and one
manufactured product, law.
The entire world was one functional distortion. There was no living object on its surface hut
man, his pets, and his parasites. No blade of grass or fragment of uncovered soil could be
found outside the hundred square miles of the Imperial Palace. No fresh water outside the
Palace grounds existed but in the vast underground cisterns that held the water supply of a
world.
The lustrous, indestructible, incorruptible metal that was the unbroken surface of the planet was
the foundation of the huge, metal structures that mazed the planet. They were structures
connected by causeways; laced by corridors; cubbyholed by offices; basemented by the huge
retail centers that covered square miles; penthoused by the glittering amusement world that
sparkled into life each night.
One could walk around the world of Trantor and never leave that one conglomerate building,
nor see the city.
A fleet of ships greater in number than all the war fleets the Empire had ever supported landed
their cargoes on Trantor each day to feed the forty billions of humans who gave nothing in
exchange but the fulfillment of the necessity of untangling the myriads of threads that spiraled
into the central administration of the most complex government Humanity had ever known.
Twenty agricultural worlds were the granary of Trantor. A universe was its servant.
Tightly held by the huge metal arms on either side, the trade ship was gently lowered down the
huge ramp that led to the hangar. Already Devers had fumed his way through the manifold
complications of a world conceived in paper work and dedicated to the principle of the
form-in-quadruplicate.
There had been the preliminary halt in space, where the first of what had grown into a hundred
questionnaires had been filled out. There were the hundred cross-examinations, the routine
administration of a simple Probe, the photographing of the ship, the Characteristic-Analysis of
the two men, and the subsequent recording of the same, the search for contraband, the
payment of the entry tax - and finally the question of the identity cards and visitor's visa.
Ducem Barr was a Siwennian and subject of the Emperor, but Lathan Devers was an unknown
without the requisite documents. The official in charge at the moment was devastated with
sorrow, but Devers could not enter. In fact, he would have to be held for official investigation.
From somewhere a hundred credits in crisp, new bills backed by the estates of Lord Brodrig
made their appearance, and changed bands quietly. The official hemmed importantly and the
devastation of his sorrow was assuaged. A new form made its appearance from the appropriate
pigeonhole. It was filled out rapidly and efficiently, with the Devers characteristic thereto
formally and properly attached.
The two men, trader and patrician, entered Siwenna.
In the hangar, the trade ship was another vessel to be cached, photographed, recorded,
contents noted, identity cards of passengers facsimiled, and for which a suitable fee was paid,
recorded, and receipted.
And then Devers was on a huge terrace under the bright white sun, along which women
chattered, children shrieked, and men sipped drinks languidly and listened to the huge
televisors blaring out the news of the Empire.
Barr paid a requisite number of iridium coins and appropriated the uppermost member of a pile
of newspapers. It was the Trantor Imperial News, official organ of the government. In the back
of the news room, there was the soft clicking noise of additional editions being printed in
long-distance sympathy with the busy machines at the Imperial News offices ten thousand
miles away by corridor - six thousand by air-machine - just as ten million sets of copies were
being likewise printed at that moment in ten million other news rooms all over the planet.
Barr glanced at the headlines and said softly, "What shall we do first?"
Devers tried to shake himself out of his depression. He was in a universe far removed from his
own, on a world that weighted him down with its intricacy, among people whose doings were
incomprehensible and whose language was nearly so. The gleaming metallic towers that
surrounded him and continued onwards in never-ending multiplicity to beyond the horizon
oppressed him; the whole busy, unheeding life of a world-metropolis cast him into the horrible
gloom of isolation and pygmyish unimportance.
He said, "I better leave it to you, doc."
Barr was calm, low-voice. "I tried to tell you, but it's hard to believe without seeing for yourself, I
know that. Do you know how many people want to see the Emperor every day? About one
million. Do you know how many he sees? About ten. We'll have to work through the civil
service, and that makes it harder. But we can't afford the aristocracy."
"We have almost one hundred thousand."
"A single Peer of the Realm would cost us that, and it would take at least three or four to form
an adequate bridge to the Emperor. It may take fifty chief commissioners and senior
supervisors to do the same, but they would cost us only a hundred apiece perhaps. I'll do the
talking. In the first place, they wouldn't understand your accent, and in the second, you don't
know the etiquette of Imperial bribery. It's an art, I assure you. Ah!"
The third page of the Imperial News had what he wanted and he passed the paper to Devers.
Devers read slowly. The vocabulary was strange, but he understood. He looked up, and his
eyes were dark with concern. He slapped the news sheet angrily with the back of his hand.
"You think this can be trusted?"
"Within limits," replied Barr, calmly. "It's highly improbable that the Foundation fleet was wiped
out. They've probably reported that several times already, if they've gone by the usual
war-reporting technique of a world capital far from the actual scene of fighting. What it means,
though, is that Riose has won another battle, which would be none-too-unexpected. It says he's
captured Loris. Is that the capital planet of the Kingdom of Loris?"
"Yes," brooded Devers, "or of what used to be the Kingdom of Loris. And it's not twenty parsecs
from the Foundation. Doc, we've got to work fast."
Barr shrugged, "You can't go fast on Trantor. If you try, you'll end up at the point of an
atom-blaster, most likely."
"How long will it take?"
"A month, if we're lucky. A month, and our hundred thousand credits - if even that will suffice.
And that is providing the Emperor does not take it into his head in the meantime to travel to the
Summer Planets, where he sees no petitioners at all."
"But the Foundation-"
"-Will take care of itself, as heretofore. Come, there's the question of dinner. I'm hungry. And
afterwards, the evening is ours and we may as well use it. We shall never see Trantor or any
world like it again, you know."
The Home Commissioner of the Outer Provinces spread his pudgy hands helplessly and
peered at the petitioners with owlish nearsightedness. "But the Emperor is indisposed,
gentlemen. It is really useless to take the matter to my superior. His Imperial Majesty has seen
no one in a week."
"He will see us," said Barr, with an affectation of confidence. "It is but a question of seeing a
member of the staff of the Privy Secretary."
"Impossible," said the commissioner emphatically. "It would be the worth of my job to attempt
that. Now if you could but be more explicit concerning the nature of your business. I'm willing to
help you, understand, but naturally I want something less vague, something I can present to my
superior as reason for taking the matter further."
"If my business were such that it could be told to any but the highest," suggested Barr,
smoothly, "it would scarcely be important enough to rate audience with His Imperial Majesty. I
propose that you take a chance. I might remind you that if His Imperial Majesty attaches the
importance to our business which we guarantee that he will, you will stand certain to receive
the honors you will deserve for helping us now."
"Yes, but-" and the commissioner shrugged, wordlessly.
"It's a chance," agreed Barr. "Naturally, a risk should have its compensation. It is a rather great
favor to ask you, but we have already been greatly obliged with your kindness in offering us this
opportunity to explain our problem. But if you would allow us to express our gratitude just
slightly by-"
Devers scowled. He had heard this speech with its slight variations twenty times in the past
month. It ended, as always, in a quick shift of the half-hidden bills. But the epilogue differed
here. Usually the bills vanished immediately; here they remained in plain view, while slowly the
commissioner counted them, inspecting them front and back as he did so.
There was a subtle change in his voice. "Backed by the Privy Secretary, hey? Good money!"
"To get back to the subject-" urged Barr.
"No, but wait," interrupted the commissioner, "let us go back by easy stages. I really do wish to
know what your business can be. This money, it is fresh and new, and you must have a good
deal, for it strikes me that you have seen other officials before me. Come, now, what about it?"
Barr said, "I don't see what you are driving at."
"Why, see here, it might be proven that you are upon the planet illegally, since the Identification
and Entry Cards of your silent friend are certainly inadequate. He is not a subject of the
Emperor."
"I deny that."
"It doesn't matter that you do," said the commissioner, with sudden bluntness. "The official who
signed his Cards for the sum of a hundred credits has confessed - under pressure - and we
know more of you than you think."
"If you are hinting, sir, that the sum we have asked you to accept is inadequate in view of the
risks-"
The commissioner smiled. "On the contrary, it is more than adequate." He tossed the bills
aside. "To return to what I was saying, it is the Emperor himself who has become interested in
your case. Is it not true, sirs, that you have recently been guests of General Riose? Is it not true
that you have escaped from the midst of his army with, to put it mildly, astonishing ease? Is it
not true that you possess a small fortune in bills backed by Lord Brodrig's estates? In short, is it
not true that you are a pair of spies and assassins sent here to - Well, you shall tell us yourself
who paid you and for what!"
"Do you know," said Barr, with silky anger, "I deny the right of a petty commissioner to accuse
us of crimes. We will leave."
"You will not leave." The commissioner arose, and his eyes no longer seemed near-sighted.
"You need answer no question now; that will be reserved for a later - and more forceful - time.
Nor am I a commissioner; I am a Lieutenant of the Imperial Police. You are under arrest."
There was a glitteringly efficient blast-gun in his fist as he smiled. "There are greater men than
you under arrest this day. It is a hornet's nest we are cleaning up."
Devers snarled and reached slowly for his own gun. The lieutenant of police smiled more
broadly and squeezed the contacts. The blasting line of force struck Devers' chest in an
accurate blaze of destruction - that bounced harmlessly off his personal shield in sparkling
spicules of light.
Devers shot in turn, and the lieutenant's head fell from off an upper torso that had disappeared.
It was still smiling as it lay in the jag of sunshine which entered through the new-made hole in
the wall.
It was through the back entrance that they left.
Devers said huskily, "Quickly to the ship. They'll have the alarm out in no time." He cursed in a
ferocious whisper. "It's another plan that's backfired. I could swear the space fiend himself is
against me."
It was in the open that they became aware of the jabbering crowds that surrounded the huge
televisors. They had no time to wait; the disconnected roaring words that reached them, they
disregarded. But Barr snatched a copy of the Imperial News before diving into the huge barn of
the hangar, where the ship lifted hastily through a giant cavity burnt fiercely into the roof.
"Can you get away from them?" asked Barr.
Ten ships of the traffic-police wildly followed the runaway craft that had burst out of the lawful,
radio-beamed Path of Leaving, and then broken every speed law in creation. Further behind
still, sleek vessels of the Secret Service were lifting in pursuit of a carefully described ship
manned by two thoroughly identified murderers.
"Watch me," said Devers, and savagely shifted into hyperspace two thousand miles above the
surface of Trantor. The shift, so near a planetary mass, meant unconsciousness for Barr and a
fearful haze of pain for Devers, but light-years further, space above them was clear.
Devers' somber pride in his ship burst to the surface. He said, "There's not an Imperial ship that
could follow me anywhere."
And then, bitterly, "But there is nowhere left to run to for us, and we can't fight their weight.
What's there to do? What can anyone do?"
Barr moved feebly on his cot. The effect of the hypershift had not yet worn off, and each of his
muscles ached. He said, "No one has to do anything. It's all over. Here!"
He passed the copy of the Imperial News that he still clutched, and the headlines were enough
for the trader.
"Recalled and arrested - Riose and Brodrig," Devers muttered. He stared blankly at Barr.
"Why?"
"The story doesn't say, but what does it matter? The war with the Foundation is over, and at
this moment, Siwenna is revolting. Read the story and see." His voice was drifting off. "We'll
stop in some of the provinces and find out the later details. If you don't mind, I'll go to sleep
now."
And he did.
In grasshopper jumps of increasing magnitude, the trade ship was spanning the Galaxy in its
return to the Foundation.
10. THE WAR ENDS
Lathan Devers felt definitely uncomfortable, and vaguely resentful. He had received his own
decoration and withstood with mute stoicism the turgid oratory of the mayor which
accompanied the slip of crimson ribbon. That had ended his share of the ceremonies, but,
naturally, formality forced him to remain. And it was formality, chiefly - the type that couldn't
allow him to yawn noisily or to swing a foot comfortably onto a chair seat - that made him long
to be in space, where he belonged.
The Siwennese delegation, with Ducem Barr a lionized member, signed the Convention, and
Siwenna became the first province to pass directly from the Empire's political rule to the
Foundation's economic one.
Five Imperial Ships of the Line - captured when Siwenna rebelled behind the lines of the
Empire's Border Fleet - flashed overhead, huge and massive, detonating a roaring salute as
they passed over the city.
Nothing but drinking, etiquette, and small talk now.
A voice called him. It was Forell; the man who, Devers realized coldly, could buy twenty of him
with a morning's profits - but a Forell who now crooked a finger at him with genial
condescension.
He stepped out upon the balcony into the cool night wind, and bowed properly, while scowling
into his bristling beard. Barr was there, too; smiling. He said, "Devers, you'll have to come to my
rescue. I'm being accused of modesty, a horrible and thoroughly unnatural crime."
"Devers," Forell removed the fat cigar from the side of his mouth when he spoke, "Lord Barr
claims that your trip to Cleon's capital had nothing to do with the recall of Riose."
"Nothing at all, sir." Devers was curt. "We never saw the Emperor. The reports we picked up on
our way back concerning the trial, showed it up to be the purest frameup. There was a mess of
rigmarole about the general being tied up with subversive interests at the court."
"And he was innocent?"
"Riose?" interposed Barr. "Yes! By the Galaxy, yes. Brodrig was a traitor on general principles
but was never guilty of the specific accusations brought against him. It was a judicial farce; but
a necessary one, a predictable one, an inevitable one."
"By psychohistorical necessity, I presume." Forell rolled the phrase sonorously with the
humorous ease of long familiarity.
"Exactly." Barr grew serious. "It never penetrated earlier, but once it was over and I could ...
well ... look at the answers in the back of the book, the problem became simple. We can see,
now , that the social background of the Empire makes wars of conquest impossible for it. Under
weak Emperors, it is tom apart by generals competing for a worthless and surely death-bringing
throne. Under strong Emperors, the Empire is frozen into a paralytic rigor in which
disintegration apparently ceases for the moment, but only at the sacrifice of all possible
growth."
Forell growled bluntly through strong puffs, "You're not clear, Lord Barr."
Barr smiled slowly. "I suppose so. It's the difficulty of not being trained in psychohistory. Words
are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations. But let's see now-"
Barr considered, while Forell relaxed, back to railing, and Devers looked into the velvet sky and
thought wonderingly of Trantor.
Then Barr said, "You see, sir, you - and Devers - and everyone no doubt, had the idea that
beating the Empire meant first prying apart the Emperor and his general. You, and Devers, and
everyone else were right - right all the time, as far as the principle of internal disunion was
concerned.
"You were wrong, however, in thinking that this internal split was something to be brought about
by individual acts, by inspirations of the moment. You tried bribery and lies. You appealed to
ambition and to fear. But you got nothing for all your pains. In fact, appearances were worse
after each attempt.
"And through all this wild threshing up of tiny ripples, the Seldon tidal wave continued onward,
quietly - but quite irresistibly."
Ducem Barr turned away, and looked over the railing at the lights of a rejoicing city. Fie said,
"There was a dead hand pushing all of us; the mighty general and the great Emperor; my world
and your world - the dead hand of Hari Seldon. Fie knew that a man like Riose would have to
fail, since it was his success that brought failure; and the greater the success, the surer the
failure."
Forell said dryly, "I can't say you're getting clearer."
"A moment," continued Barr earnestly. "Look at the situation. A weak general could never have
endangered us, obviously. A strong general during the time of a weak Emperor would never
have endangered us, either; for he would have turned his arms towards a much more fruitful
target. Events have shown that three-fourths of the Emperors of the last two centuries were
rebel generals and rebel viceroys before they were Emperors.
"So it is only the combination of strong Emperor and strong general that can harm the
Foundation; for a strong Emperor can not be dethroned easily, and a strong general is forced to
turn outwards, past the frontiers.
"But, what keeps the Emperor strong? What kept Cleon strong? It's obvious. Fie is strong,
because he permits no strong subjects. A courtier who becomes too rich, or a general who
becomes too popular is dangerous. All the recent history of the Empire proves that to any
Emperor intelligent enough to be strong.
"Riose won victories, so the Emperor grew suspicious. All the atmosphere of the times forced
him to be suspicious. Did Riose refuse a bribe? Very suspicious; ulterior motives. Did his most
trusted courtier suddenly favor Riose? Very suspicious; ulterior motives. It wasn't the individual
acts that were suspicious. Anything else would have done which is why our individual plots
were unnecessary and rather futile. It was the success of Riose that was suspicious. So he was
recalled, and accused, condemned, murdered. The Foundation wins again.
"Look, there is not a conceivable combination of events that does not result in the Foundation
winning. It was inevitable; whatever Riose did, whatever we did."
The Foundation magnate nodded ponderously. "So! But what if the Emperor and the general
had been the same person. Fley? What then? That's a case you didn't cover, so you haven't
proved your point yet."
Barr shrugged. "I can't prove anything; I haven't the mathematics. But I appeal to your reason.
With an Empire in which every aristocrat, every strong man, every pirate can aspire to the
Throne - and, as history shows, often successfully - what would happen to even a strong
Emperor who preoccupied himself with foreign wars at the extreme end of the Galaxy? How
long would he have to remain away from the capital before somebody raised the standards of
civil war and forced him home. The social environment of the Empire would make that time
short.
"I once told Riose that not all the Empire's strength could swerve the dead hand of Hari
Seldom"
"Good! Good!" Forell was expansively pleased. "Then you imply the Empire can never threaten
us again."
"It seems to me so," agreed Barr. "Frankly, Cleon may not live out the year, and there's going to
be a disputed succession almost as a matter of course, which might mean the last civil war for
the Empire."
"Then," said Forell, "there are no more enemies."
Barr was thoughtful. "There's a Second Foundation."
"At the other end of the Galaxy? Not for centuries."
Devers turned suddenly at this, and his face was dark as he faced Forell. "There are internal
enemies, perhaps."
"Are there?" asked Forell, coolly. "Who, for instance?"
"People, for instance, who might like to spread the wealth a bit, and keep it from concentrating
too much out of the hands that work for it. See what I mean?"
Slowly, Forell's gaze lost its contempt and grew one with the anger of Devers' own.
PART II
THE MULE
11. BRIDE AND GROOM
THE MULE Less is known of "The Mule" than of any character of comparable significance to
Galactic history. Even the period of his greatest renown is known to us chiefly through the eyes
of his antagonists and, principally, through those of a young bride....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Bayta's first sight of Haven was entirely the contrary of spectacular. Her husband pointed it out
- a dull star lost in the emptiness of the Galaxy's edge. It was past the last sparse clusters, to
where straggling points of light gleamed lonely. And even among these it was poor and
inconspicuous.
Toran was quite aware that as the earliest prelude to married life, the Red Dwarf lacked
impressiveness and his lips curled self-consciously. "I know, Bay - It isn't exactly a proper
change, is it? I mean from the Foundation to this."
"A horrible change, Toran. I should never have married you."
And when his face looked momentarily hurt, before he caught himself, she said with her special
"cozy" tone, "All right, silly. Now let your lower lip droop and give me that special dying-duck
look - the one just before you're supposed to bury your head on my shoulder, while I stroke
your hair full of static electricity. You were fishing for some drivel, weren't you? You were
expecting me to say 'I'd be happy anywhere with you, Toran!' or 'The interstellar depths
themselves would be home, my sweet, were you but with me!' Now you admit it."
She pointed a finger at him and snatched it away an instant before his teeth closed upon it.
He said, "If I surrender, and admit you're right, will you prepare dinner?"
She nodded contentedly. He smiled, and just looked at her.
She wasn't beautiful on the grand scale to others - he admitted that - even if everybody did
look twice. Her hair was dark and glossy, though straight, her mouth a bit wide - but her
meticulous, close-textured eyebrows separated a white, unlined forehead from the warmest
mahogany eyes ever filled with smiles.
And behind a very sturdily-built and staunchly-defended facade of practical, unromantic,
hard-headedness towards life, there was just that little pool of softness that would never show if
you poked for it, but could be reached if you knew just how - and never let on that you were
looking for it.
Toran adjusted the controls unnecessarily and decided to relax. He was one interstellar jump,
and then several milli-microparsecs "on the straight" before manipulation by hand was
necessary. He leaned over backwards to look into the storeroom, where Bayta was juggling
appropriate containers.
There was quite a bit of smugness about his attitude towards Bayta - the satisfied awe that
marks the triumph of someone who has been hovering at the edge of an inferiority complex for
three years.
After all he was a provincial - and not merely a provincial, but the son of a renegade Trader.
And she was of the Foundation itself - and not merely that, but she could trace her ancestry
back to Mallow.
And with all that, a tiny quiver underneath. To take her back to Haven, with its rock-world and
cave-cities was bad enough. To have her face the traditional hostility of Trader for Foundation -
nomad for city dweller - was worse.
Still - After supper, the last jump!
Haven was an angry crimson blaze, and the second planet was a ruddy patch of light with
atmosphere-blurred rim and a half-sphere of darkness. Bayta leaned over the large view table
with its spidering of crisscross lines that centered Haven II neatly.
She said gravely, "I wish I had met your father first. If he takes a dislike to me-"
"Then," said Toran matter-of-factly, "you would be the first pretty girl to inspire that in him.
Before he lost his arm and stopped roving around the Galaxy, he - Well, if you ask him about it,
he'll talk to you about it till your ears wear down to a nubbin. After a while I got to thinking that
he was embroidering; because he never told the same story twice the same way-"
Haven II was rushing up at them now. The landlocked sea wheeled ponderously below them,
slate-gray in the lowering dimness and lost to sight, here and there, among the wispy clouds.
Mountains jutted raggedly along the coast.
The sea became wrinkled with nearness and, as it veered off past the horizon just at the end,
there was one vanishing glimpse of shore-hugging ice fields.
Toran grunted under the fierce deceleration, "Is your suit locked?"
Bayta's plump face was round and ruddy in the incasing sponge-foam of the internally-heated,
skin-clinging costume.
The ship lowered crunchingly on the open field just short of the lifting of the plateau.
They climbed out awkwardly into the solid darkness of the outer-galactic night, and Bayta
gasped as the sudden cold bit, and the thin wind swirled emptily. Toran seized her elbow and
nudged her into an awkward run over the smooth, packed ground towards the sparking of
artificial light in the distance.
The advancing guards met them halfway, and after a whispered exchange of words, they were
taken onward. The wind and the cold disappeared when the gate of rock opened and then
closed behind them. The warm interior, white with wall-light, was filled with an incongruous
humming bustle. Men looked up from their desks, and Toran produced documents.
They were waved onward after a short glance and Toran whispered to his wife, "Dad must have
fixed up the preliminaries. The usual lapse here is about five hours."
They burst into the open and Bayta said suddenly, "Oh, my-"
The cave city was in daylight - the white daylight of a young sun. Not that there was a sun, of
course. What should have been the sky was lost in the unfocused glow of an over-all brilliance.
And the warm air was properly thick and fragrant with greenery.
Bayta said, "Why, Toran, it's beautiful."
Toran grinned with anxious delight. "Well, now, Bay, it isn't like anything on the Foundation, of
course, but it's the biggest city on Haven II - twenty thousand people, you know - and you'll get
to like it. No amusement palaces, I'm afraid, but no secret police either."
"Oh, Torie, it's just like a toy city. It's all white and pink - and so clean."
"Well-" Toran looked at the city with her. The houses were two stories high for the most part,
and of the smooth vein rock indigenous to the region. The spires of the Foundation were
missing, and the colossal community houses of the Old Kingdoms - but the smallness was
there and the individuality; a relic of personal initiative in a Galaxy of mass life.
He snapped to sudden attention. "Bay - There's Dad! Right there - where I'm pointing, silly.
Don't you see him?"
She did. It was just the impression of a large man, waving frantically, fingers spread wide as
though groping wildly in air. The deep thunder of a drawn-out shout reached them. Bayta trailed
her husband, rushing downwards over the close-cropped lawn. She caught sight of a smaller
man, white-haired, almost lost to view behind the robust One-arm, who still waved and still
shouted.
Toran cried over his shoulder, "It's my father's half-brother. The one who's been to the
Foundation. You know."
They met in the grass, laughing and incoherent, and Toran's father let out a final whoop for
sheer joy. He hitched at his short jacket and adjusted the metal-chased belt that was his one
concession to luxury.
His eyes shifted from one of the youngsters to the other, and then he said, a little out of breath,
"You picked a rotten day to return home, boy!"
"What? Oh, it is Seldon's birthday, isn't it?"
"It is. I had to rent a car to make the trip here, and dragoon Randu to drive it. Not a public
vehicle to be had at gun's point."
His eyes were on Bayta now, and didn't leave. He spoke to her more softly, "I have the crystal
of you right here - and it's good, but I can see the fellow who took it was an amateur."
He had the small cube of transparency out of his jacket pocket and in the light the laughing little
face within sprang to vivid colored life as a miniature Bayta.
"That one!" said Bayta. "Now I wonder why Toran should send that caricature. I'm surprised you
let me come near you, sir."
"Are you now? Call me Fran. I'll have none of this fancy mess. For that, I think you can take my
arm, and we'll go on to the car. Till now I never did think my boy knew what he was ever up to. I
think I'll change that opinion. I think I'll have to change that opinion."
Toran said to his half uncle softly, "How is the old man these days? Does he still hound the
women?"
Randu puckered up all over his face when he smiled. "When he can, Toran, when he can.
There are times when he remembers that his next birthday will be his sixtieth, and that
disheartens him. But he shouts it down, this evil thought, and then he is himself. He is a Trader
of the ancient type. But you, Toran. Where did you find such a pretty wife?"
The young man chuckled and linked arms. "Do you want a three years' history at a gasp,
uncle?"
It was in the small living room of the home that Bayta struggled out of her traveling cloak and
hood and shook her hair loose. She sat down, crossing her knees, and returned the
appreciative stare of this large, ruddy man.
She said, "I know what you're trying to estimate, and I'll help you; Age, twenty-four, height,
five-four, weight, one-ten, educational specialty, history." She noticed that he always crooked
his stand so as to hide the missing arm. But now Fran leaned close and said, "Since you
mention it -weight, one-twenty."
He laughed loudly at her flush. Then he said to the company in general, "You can always tell a
woman's weight by her upper arm - with due experience, of course. Do you want a drink, Bay?"
"Among other things," she said, and they left together, while Toran busied himself at the book
shelves to check for new additions.
Fran returned alone and said, "She'll be down later."
He lowered himself heavily into the large comer chair and placed his stiff-jointed left leg on the
stool before it. The laughter had left his red face, and Toran turned to face him.
Fran said, "Well, you're home, boy, and I'm glad you are. I like your woman. She's no whining
ninny."
"I married her," said Toran simply.
"Well, that's another thing altogether, boy." His eyes darkened. "It's a foolish way to tie up the
future. In my longer life, and more experienced, I never did such a thing."
Randu interrupted from the comer where he stood quietly. "Now Franssart, what comparisons
are you making? Till your crash landing six years ago you were never in one spot long enough
to establish residence requirements for marriage, And since then, who would have you?"
The one-armed man jerked erect in his seat and replied hotly, "Many, you snowy dotard-"
Toran said with hasty tact, "It's largely a legal formality, Dad. The situation has its
conveniences."
"Mostly for the woman," grumbled Fran.
"And even if so," agreed Randu, "it's up to the boy to decide. Marriage is an old custom among
the Foundationers."
"The Foundationers are not fit models for an honest Trader," smoldered Fran.
Toran broke in again, "My wife is a Foundationer." Fie looked from one to the other, and then
said quietly, "She's coming."
The conversation took a general turn after the evening meal, which Fran had spiced with three
tales of reminiscence composed of equal parts of blood, women, profits, and embroidery. The
small televisor was on, and some classic drama was playing itself out in an unregarded
whisper. Randu had hitched himself into a more comfortable position on the low couch and
gazed past the slow smoke of his long pipe to where Bayta had knelt down upon the softness
of the white fur mat brought back once long ago from a trade mission and now spread out only
upon the most ceremonious occasions.
"You have studied history, my girl?" he asked, pleasantly.
Bayta nodded. "I was the despair of my teachers, but I learned a bit, eventually."
"A citation for scholarship," put in Toran, smugly, "that's all!"
"And what did you learn?" proceeded Randu, smoothly.
"Everything? Now?" laughed the girl.
The old man smiled gently. "Well then, what do you think of the Galactic situation?"
"I think," said Bayta, concisely, "that a Seldon crisis is pending - and that if it isn't then away
with the Seldon plan altogether. It is a failure."
("Whew," muttered Fran, from his comer. "What a way to speak of Seldon." But he said nothing
aloud.)
Randu sucked at his pipe speculatively. "Indeed? Why do you say that? I was to the
Foundation, you know, in my younger days, and I, too, once thought great dramatic thoughts.
But, now, why do you say that?"
"Well," Bayta's eyes misted with thought as she curled her bare toes into the white softness of
the rug and nestled her little chin in one plump hand, "it seems to me that the whole essence of
Seldon's plan was to create a world better than the ancient one of the Galactic Empire. It was
failing apart, that world, three centuries ago, when Seldon first established the Foundation -
and if history speaks truly, it was falling apart of the triple disease of inertia, despotism, and
maldistribution of the goods of the universe."
Randu nodded slowly, while Toran gazed with proud, luminous eyes at his wife, and Fran in the
comer clucked his tongue and carefully refilled his glass.
Bayta said, "If the story of Seldon is true, he foresaw the complete collapse of the Empire
through his Jaws of psychohistory, and was able to predict the necessary thirty thousand years
of barbarism before the establishment of a new Second Empire to restore civilization and
culture to humanity. It was the whole aim of his life-work to set up such conditions as would
insure a speedier rejuvenation,"
The deep voice of Fran burst out, "And that's why he established the two Foundations, honor
be to his name."
"And that's why he established the two Foundations," assented Bayta. "Our Foundation was a
gathering of the scientists of the dying Empire intended to carry on the science and learning of
man to new heights. And the Foundation was so situated in space and the historical
environment was such that through the careful calculations of his genius, Seldon foresaw that
in one thousand years, it would become a newer, greater Empire."
There was a reverent silence.
The girl said softly, "It's an old story. You all know it. For almost three centuries every human
being of the Foundation has known it. But I thought it would be appropriate to go through it -
just quickly. Today is Seldon's birthday, you know, and even if I am of the Foundation, and you
are of Flaven, we have that in common-"
She lit a cigarette slowly, and watched the glowing tip absently. "The laws of history are as
absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because
history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations
count for more. Seldon predicted a series of crises through the thousand years of growth, each
of which would force a new turning of our history into a pre-calculated path. It is those crises
which direct us - and therefore a crisis must come now.
"Now!" she repeated, forcefully. "It's almost a century since the last one, and in that century,
every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows
one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one
desire; to hold what is theirs."
"While others starve!" roared Fran suddenly with a mighty blow of his fist upon the arm of his
chair. "Girl, your words are pearls. The fat guts on their moneybags ruin the Foundation, while
the brave Traders hide their poverty on dregs of worlds like Flaven. It's a disgrace to Seldon, a
casting of dirt in his face, a spewing in his beard." Fie raised his arm high, and then his face
lengthened. "If I had my other arm! If - once - they had listened to me!"
"Dad," said Toran, "take it easy."
"Take it easy. Take it easy," his father mimicked savagely. "We'll live here and die here forever
- and you say, take it easy."
"That's our modern Lathan Devers," said Randu, gesturing with his pipe, "this Fran of ours.
Devers died in the slave mines eighty years ago with your husband's great-grandfather,
because he lacked wisdom and didn't lack heart-"
"Yes, by the Galaxy, I'd do the same if I were he," swore Fran. "Devers was the greatest Trader
in history - greater than the overblown windbag, Mallow, the Foundationers worship. If the
cutthroats who lord the Foundation killed him because he loved justice, the greater the
blood-debt owed them."
"Go on, girl," said Randu. "Go on, or, surely, he'll talk a the night and rave all the next day."
"There's nothing to go on about," she said, with a sudden gloom. "There must be a crisis, but I
don't know how to make one. The progressive forces on the Foundation are oppressed
fearfully. You Traders may have the will, but you are hunted and disunited. If all the forces of
good will in and out of the Foundation could combine-"
Fran's laugh was a raucous jeer. "Listen to her, Randu, listen to her. In and out of the
Foundation, she says. Girl, girl, there's no hope in the flab-sides of the Foundation. Among
them some hold the whip and the rest are whipped dead whipped. Not enough spunk left in the
whole rotten world to outface one good Trader."
Bayta's attempted interruptions broke feebly against the overwhelming wind.
Toran leaned over and put a hand over her mouth. "Dad," he said, coldly, "you've never been
on the Foundation. You know nothing about it. I tell you that the underground there is brave and
daring enough. I could tell you that Bayta was one of them-"
"All right, boy, no offense. Now, where's the cause for anger?" Fie was genuinely perturbed.
Toran drove on fervently, "The trouble with you, Dad, is that you've got a provincial outlook.
You think because some hundred thousand Traders scurry into holes on an unwanted planet at
the end of nowhere, that they're a great people. Of course, any tax collector from the
Foundation that gets here never leaves again, but that's cheap heroism. What would you do if
the Foundation sent a fleet?"
"We'd blast them," said Fran, sharply.
"And get blasted - with the balance in their favor. You're outnumbered, outarmed, outorganized
- and as soon as the Foundation thinks it worth its while, you'll realize that. So you had better
seek your allies - on the Foundation itself, if you can."
"Randu, said Fran, looking at his brother like a great, helpless bull.
Randu took his pipe away from his lips, "The boy's right, Fran. When you listen to the little
thoughts deep inside you, you know he is. But they're uncomfortable thoughts, so you drown
them out with that roar of yours. But they're still there. Toran, I'll tell you why I brought all this
up."
Fie puffed thoughtfully awhile, then dipped his pipe into the neck of the tray, waited for the silent
flash, and withdrew it clean. Slowly, he filled it again with precise tamps of his little finger.
He said, "Your little suggestion of Foundation's interest in us, Toran, is to the point. There have
been two recent visits lately - for tax purposes. The disturbing point is that the second visitor
was accompanied by a light patrol ship. They landed in Gleiar City - giving us the miss for a
change - and they never lifted off again, naturally. But now they'll surely be back. Your father is
aware of all this, Toran, he really is.
"Look at the stubborn rakehell. He knows Haven is in trouble, and he knows we're helpless, but
he repeats his formulas. It warms and protects him. But once he's had his say, and roared his
defiance, and feels he's discharged his duty as a man and a Bull Trader, why he's as
reasonable as any of us."
"Any of who?" asked Bayta.
He smiled at her. "We've formed a little group, Bayta - just in our city. We haven't done
anything, yet. We haven't even managed to contact the other cities yet, but it's a start."
"But towards what?"
Randu shook his head. "We don't know-yet. We hope for a miracle. We have decided that, as
you say, a Seldon crisis must be at hand." He gestured widely upwards. "The Galaxy is full of
the chips and splinters of the broken Empire. The generals swarm. Do you suppose the time
may come when one will grow bold?"
Bayta considered, and shook her head decisively, so that the long straight hair with the single
inward curl at the end swirled about her ears. "No, not a chance. There's not one of those
generals who doesn't know that an attack on the Foundation is suicide. Bel Riose of the old
Empire was a better man than any of them, and he attacked with the resources of a galaxy, and
couldn't win against the Seldon Plan. Is there one general that doesn't know that?"
"But what if we spur them on?"
"Into where? Into an atomic furnace? With what could you possibly spur them?"
"Well, there is one - a new one. In this past year or two, there has come word of a strange man
whom they call the Mule."
"The Mule?" She considered. "Ever hear of him, Torie?"
Toran shook his head. She said, "What about him?"
"I don't know. But he wins victories at, they say, impossible odds. The rumors may be
exaggerated, but it would be interesting, in any case, to become acquainted with him. Not every
man with sufficient ability and sufficient ambition would believe in Hari Seldon and his laws of
psychohistory. We could encourage that disbelief. He might attack."
"And the Foundation would win."
"Yes - but not necessarily easily. It might be a crisis, and we could take advantage of such a
crisis to force a compromise with the despots of the Foundation. At the worst, they would forget
us long enough to enable us to plan farther."
"What do you think, Torie?"
Toran smiled feebly and pulled at a loose brown curl that fell over one eye. "The way he
describes it, it can't hurt; but who is the Mule? What do you know of him, Randu?"
"Nothing yet. For that, we could use you, Toran. And your wife, if she's willing. We've talked of
this, your father and I. We've talked of this thoroughly."
"In what way, Randu? What do you want of us?" The young man cast a quick inquisitive look at
his wife.
"Have you had a honeymoon?"
"Well ... yes ... if you can call the trip from the Foundation a honeymoon."
"How about a better one on Kalgan? It's semitropical beaches - water sports - bird hunting -
quite the vacation spot. It's about seven thousand parsecs in-not too far."
"What's on Kalgan?"
"The Mule! His men, at least. He took it last month, and without a battle, though Kalgan's
warlord broadcast a threat to blow the planet to ionic dust before giving it up."
"Where's the warlord now?"
"He isn't," said Randu, with a shrug. "What do you say?"
"But what are we to do?"
"I don't know. Fran and I are old; we're provincial. The Traders of Haven are all essentially
provincial. Even you say so. Our trading is of a very restricted sort, and we're not the Galaxy
roamers our ancestors were, Shut up, Fran! But you two know the Galaxy. Bayta, especially,
speaks with a nice Foundation accent. We merely wish whatever you can find out. If you can
make contact ... but we wouldn't expect that. Suppose you two think it over. You can meet our
entire group if you wish ... oh, not before next week. You ought to have some time to catch your
breath."
There was a pause and then Fran roared, "Who wants; another drink? I mean, besides me?"
12. CAPTAIN AND MAYOR
Captain Han Pritcher was unused to the luxury of his surroundings and by no means
impressed. As a general thing, he discouraged self-analysis and all forms of philosophy and
metaphysics not directly connected with his work.
It helped.
His work consisted largely of what the War Department called "intelligence," the sophisticates,
"espionage," and the romanticists, "spy stuff." And, unfortunately, despite the frothy shrillness of
the televisors, "intelligence," "espionage," and "spy stuff" are at best a sordid business of
routine betrayal and bad faith. It is excused by society since it is in the "interest of the State,"
but since philosophy seemed always to lead Captain Pritcher to the conclusion that even in that
holy interest, society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience - he discouraged
philosophy.
And now, in the luxury of the mayor's anteroom, his thoughts turned inward despite himself.
Men had been promoted over his head continuously, though of lesser ability - that much was
admitted. He had withstood an eternal rain of black marks and official reprimands, and survived
it. And stubbornly he had held to his own way in the firm belief that insubordination in that same
holy "interest of the State" would yet be recognized for the service it was.
So here he was in the anteroom of the mayor-with five soldiers as a respectful guard, and
probably a court-martial awaiting him.
The heavy, marble doors rolled apart smoothly, silently, revealing satiny walls, a red plastic
carpeting, and two more marble doors, metal-inlaid, within. Two officials in the straight-lined
costume of three centuries back, stepped out, and called:
"An audience to Captain Han Pritcher of Information."
They stepped back with a ceremonious bow as the captain started forward. His escort stopped
at the outer door, and he entered the inner alone.
On the other side of the doors, in a large room strangely simple, behind a large desk strangely
angular, sat a small man, almost lost in the immensity,
Mayor Indbur - successively the third of that name - was the grandson of the first Indbur, who
had been brutal and capable; and who had exhibited the first quality in spectacular fashion by
his manner of seizing power, and the latter by the skill with which he put an end to the last
farcical remnants of free election and the even greater skill with which he maintained a
relatively peaceful rule.
Mayor Indbur was also the son of the second Indbur, who was the first Mayor of the Foundation
to succeed to his post by right of birth - and who was only half his father, for he was merely
brutal.
So Mayor Indbur was the third of the name and the second to succeed by right of birth, and he
was the least of the three, for he was neither brutal nor capable - but merely an excellent
bookkeeper born wrong.
Indbur the Third was a peculiar combination of ersatz characteristics to all but himself.
To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was "system," an indefatigable and feverish
interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy was "industry," indecision when right
was "caution," and blind stubbornness when wrong, "determination."
And withal he wasted no money, killed no man needlessly, and meant extremely well.
If Captain Pritcher's gloomy thoughts ran along these lines as he remained respectfully in place
before the large desk, the wooden arrangement of his features yielded no insight into the fact.
He neither coughed, shifted weight, nor shuffled his feet until the thin face of the mayor lifted
slowly as the busy stylus ceased in its task of marginal notations, and a sheet of close-printed
paper was lifted from one neat stack and placed upon another neat stack.
Mayor Indbur clasped his hands carefully before him, deliberately refraining from disturbing the
careful arrangement of desk accessories.
He said, in acknowledgment, "Captain Han Pritcher of Information."
And Captain Pritcher in strict obedience to protocol bent one knee nearly to the ground and
bowed his head until he heard the words of release.
"Arise, Captain Pritcher!"
The mayor said with an air of warm sympathy, "You are here, Captain Pritcher, because of
certain disciplinary action taken against yourself by your superior officer. The papers
concerning such action have come, in the ordinary course of events, to my notice, and since no
event in the Foundation is of disinterest to me, I took the trouble to ask for further information
on your case. You are not, I hope, surprised."
Captain Pritcher said unemotionally, "Excellence, no. Your justice is proverbial."
"Is it? Is it?" His tone was pleased, and the tinted contact lenses he wore caught the light in a
manner that imparted a hard, dry gleam to his eyes. Meticulously, he fanned out a series of
metal-bound folders before him. The parchment sheets within crackled sharply as he turned
them, his long finger following down the line as he spoke.
"I have your record here, captain - complete. You are forty-three and have been an Officer of
the Armed Forces for seventeen years. You were born in Loris, of Anacreonian parents, no
serious childhood diseases, an attack of myo ... well, that's of no importance ... education,
premilitary, at the Academy of Sciences, major, hyper-engines, academic standing ... hm-m-m,
very good, you are to be congratulated ... entered the Army as Under-Officer on the one
hundred second day of the 293rd year of the Foundation Era."
He lifted his eyes momentarily as he shifted the first folder, and opened the second.
"You see," he said, "in my administration, nothing is left to chance. Order! System!"
He lifted a pink, scented jelly-globule to his lips. It was his one vice, and but dolingly indulged
in. Witness the fact that the mayor's desk lacked that almost-inevitable atom flash for the
disposal of dead tobacco. For the mayor did not smoke.
Nor, as a matter of course, did his visitors.
The mayor's voice droned on, methodically, slurringly, mumblingly - now and then interspersed
with whispered comments of equally mild and equally ineffectual commendation or reproof.
Slowly, he replaced the folders as originally, in a single neat pile.
"Well, captain," he said, briskly, "your record is unusual. Your ability is outstanding, it would
seem, and your services valuable beyond question. I note that you have been wounded in the
line of duty twice, and that you have been awarded the Order of Merit for bravery beyond the
call of duty. Those are facts not lightly to be minimized."
Captain Pritcher's expressionless face did not soften. He remained stiffly erect. Protocol
required that a subject honored by an audience with the mayor may not sit down - a point
perhaps needlessly reinforced by the fact that only one chair existed in the room, the one
underneath the mayor. Protocol further required no statements other than those needed to
answer a direct question.
The mayor's eyes bore down hard upon the soldier and his voice grew pointed and heavy.
"However, you have not been promoted in ten years, and your superiors report, over and over
again, of the unbending stubbornness of your character. You are reported to be chronically
insubordinate, incapable of maintaining a correct attitude towards superior officers, apparently
uninterested in maintaining frictionless relationships with your colleagues, and an incurable
troublemaker, besides. How do you explain that, captain?"
"Excellence, I do what seems right to me. My deeds on behalf of the State, and my wounds in
that cause bear witness that what seems fight to me is also in the interest of the State."
"A soldierly statement, captain, but a dangerous doctrine. More of that, later. Specifically, you
are charged with refusing an assignment three times in the face of orders signed by my legal
delegates. What have you to say to that?"
"Excellence, the assignment lacks significance in a critical time, where matters of first
importance are being ignored."
"Ah, and who tells you these matters you speak of are of the first importance at all, and if they
are, who tells you further that they are ignored?"
"Excellence, these things are quite evident to me. My experience and my knowledge of events
- the value of neither of which my superiors deny - make it plain."
"But, my good captain, are you blind that you do not see that by arrogating to yourself the right
to determine Intelligence policy, you usurp the duties of your superior?"
"Excellence, my duty is primarily to the State, and not to my superior."
"Fallacious, for your superior has his superior, and that superior is myself, and I am the State.
But come, you shall have no cause to complain of this justice of mine that you say is proverbial.
State in your own words the nature of the breach in discipline that has brought all this on."
"Excellence, my duty is primarily to the State, and not to my living the life of a retired merchant
mariner upon the world of Kalgan. My instructions were to direct Foundation activity upon the
planet, perfect an organization to act as check upon the warlord of Kalgan, particularly as
regards his foreign policy."
"This is known to me. Continue!"
"Excellence, my reports have continually stressed the strategic positions of Kalgan and the
systems it controls. I have reported on the ambition of the warlord, his resources, his
determination to extend his domain and his essential friendliness - or, perhaps, neutrality -
towards the Foundation."
"I have read your reports thoroughly. Continue!"
"Excellence, I returned two months ago. At that time, there was no sign of impending war; no
sign of anything but an almost superfluity of ability to repel any conceivable attack. One month
ago, an unknown soldier of fortune took Kalgan without a fight. The man who was once warlord
of Kalgan is apparently no longer alive. Men do not speak of treason - they speak only of the
power and genius of this strange condottiere - this Mule."
"This who?" the mayor leaned forward, and looked offended.
"Excellence, he is known as the Mule. He is spoken of little, in a factual sense, but I have
gathered the scraps and fragments of knowledge and winnowed out the most probable of them.
He is apparently a man of neither birth nor standing. His father, unknown. His mother, dead in
childbirth. His upbringing, that of a vagabond. His education, that of the tramp worlds, and the
backwash alleys of space. He has no name other than that of the Mule, a name reportedly
applied by himself to himself, and signifying, by popular explanation, his immense physical
strength, and stubbornness of purpose."
"What is his military strength, captain? Never mind his physique."
"Excellence, men speak of huge fleets, but in this they may be influenced by the strange fall of
Kalgan. The territory he controls is not large, though its exact limits are not capable of definite
determination. Nevertheless, this man must be investigated."
"Hm-m-m. So! So!" The mayor fell into a reverie, and slowly with twenty-four strokes of his
stylus drew six squares in hexagonal arrangements upon the blank top sheet of a pad, which
he tore off, folded neatly in three parts and slipped into the wastepaper slot at his right hand. It
slid towards a clean and silent atomic disintegration.
"Now then, tell me, captain, what is the alternative? You have told me what 'must' be
investigated. What have you been ordered to investigate?"
"Excellence, there is a rat hole in space that, it seems, does not pay its taxes."
"Ah, and is that all? You are not aware, and have not been told that these men who do not pay
their taxes, are descendants of the wild Traders of our early days - anarchists, rebels, social
maniacs who claim Foundation ancestry and deride Foundation culture. You are not aware,
and have not been told, that this rat hole in space, is not one, but many; that these rat holes are
in greater number than we know; that these rat holes conspire together, one with the other, and
all with the criminal elements that still exist throughout Foundation territory. Even here, captain,
even here!"
The mayor's momentary fire subsided quickly. "You are not aware, captain?"
"Excellence, I have been told all this. But as servant of the State, I must serve faithfully - and
he serves most faithfully who serves Truth. Whatever the political implications of these dregs of
the ancient Traders - the warlords who have inherited the splinters of the old Empire have the
power. The Traders have neither arms nor resources. They have not even unity. I am not a tax
collector to be sent on a child's errand."
"Captain Pritcher, you are a soldier, and count guns. It is a failing to be allowed you up to the
point where it involves disobedience to myself. Take care. My justice is not simply weakness.
Captain, it has already been proven that the generals of the Imperial Age and the warlords of
the present age are equally impotent against us. Seldon's science which predicts the course of
the Foundation is based, not on individual heroism, as you seem to believe, but on the social
and economic trends of history. We have passed successfully through four crises already, have
we not?"
"Excellence, we have. Yet Seldon's science is known only to Seldon. We ourselves have but
faith. In the first three crises, as I have been carefully taught, the Foundation was led by wise
leaders who foresaw the nature of the crises and took the proper precautions. Otherwise - who
can say?"
"Yes, captain, but you omit the fourth crisis. Come, captain, we had no leadership worthy of the
name then, and we faced the cleverest opponent, the heaviest armor, the strongest force of all.
Yet we won by the inevitability of history."
"Excellence, that is true. But this history you mention became inevitable only after we had
fought desperately for over a year. The inevitable victory we won cost us half a thousand ships
and half a million men. Excellence, Seldon's plan helps those who help themselves."
Mayor Indbur frowned and grew suddenly tired of his patient exposition. It occurred to him that
there was a fallacy in condescension, since it was mistaken for permission to argue eternally; to
grow contentious; to wallow in dialectic. Fie said, stiffly, "Nevertheless, captain, Seldon
guarantees victory over the warlords, and I can not, in these busy times, indulge in a dispersal
of effort. These Traders you dismiss are Foundation-derived. A war with them would be a civil
war. Seldon's plan makes no guarantee there for us - since they anc/we are Foundation. So
they must be brought to heel. You have your orders."
"Excellence-"
"You have been asked no question, captain. You have your orders. You will obey those orders.
Further argument of any sort with myself or those representing myself will be considered
treason. You are excused."
Captain Flan Pritcher knelt once more, then left with slow, backward steps.
Mayor Indbur, third of his name, and second mayor of Foundation history to be so by fight of
birth, recovered his equilibrium, and lifted another sheet of paper from the neat stack at his left.
It was a report on the saving of funds due to the reduction of the quantity of metal-foam edging
on the uniforms of the police force. Mayor Indbur crossed out a superfluous comma, corrected
a misspelling, made three marginal notations, and placed it upon the neat stack at his fight. Fie
lifted another sheet of paper from the neat stack at his left.
Captain Flan Pritcher of Information found a Personal Capsule waiting for him when he returned
to barracks. It contained orders, terse and redly underlined with a stamped "URGENT"' across
it, and the whole initialed with a precise, capital "I".
Captain Han Pritcher was ordered to the "rebel world called Haven" in the strongest terms.
Captain Han Pritcher, alone in his light one-man speedster, set his course quietly and calmly
for Kalgan. He slept that night the sleep of a successfully stubborn man.
13. LIEUTENANT AND CLOWN
If, from a distance of seven thousand parsecs, the fall of Kalgan to the armies of the Mule had
produced reverberations that had excited the curiosity of an old Trader, the apprehension of a
dogged captain, and the annoyance of a meticulous mayor - to those on Kalgan itself, it
produced nothing and excited no one. It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in
time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever
been permanently learned.
Kalgan was - Kalgan. It alone of all that quadrant of the Galaxy seemed not to know that the
Empire had fallen, that the Stannells no longer ruled, that greatness had departed, and peace
had disappeared.
Kalgan was the luxury world. With the edifice of mankind crumbling, it maintained its integrity as
a producer of pleasure, a buyer of gold and a seller of leisure.
It escaped the harsher vicissitudes of history, for what conqueror would destroy or even
seriously damage a world so full of the ready cash that would buy immunity.
Yet even Kalgan had finally become the headquarters of a warlord and its softness had been
tempered to the exigencies of war.
Its tamed jungles, its mildly modeled shores, and its garishly glamorous cities echoed to the
march of imported mercenaries and impressed citizens. The worlds of its province had been
armed and its money invested in battleships rather than bribes for the first time in its history. Its
ruler proved beyond doubt that he was determined to defend what was his and eager to seize
what was others. He was a great one of the Galaxy, a war and peace maker, a builder of
Empire, an establisher of dynasty.
And an unknown with a ridiculous nickname had taken him - and his arms - and his budding
Empire - and had not even fought a battle.
So Kalgan was as before, and its uniformed citizens hurried back to their older life, while the
foreign professionals of war merged easily into the newer bands that descended.
Again as always, there were the elaborate luxury hunts for the cultivated animal life of the
jungles that never took human life; and the speedster bird-chases in the air above, that was
fatal only to the Great Birds.
In the cities, the escapers of the Galaxy could take their varieties of pleasure to suit their purse,
from the ethereal sky-palaces of spectacle and fantasy that opened their doors to the masses
at the jingle of half a credit, to the unmarked, unnoted haunts to which only those of great
wealth were of the cognoscenti.
To the vast flood, Toran and Bayta added not even a trickle. They registered their ship in the
huge common hangar on the East Peninsula, and gravitated to that compromise of the
middle-classes, the Inland Sea-where the pleasures were yet legal, and even respectable, and
the crowds not yet beyond endurance.
Bayta wore dark glasses against the light, and a thin, white robe against the heat. Warm-tinted
arms, scarcely the goldener for the sun, clasped her knees to her, and she stared with firm,
abstracted gaze at the length of her husband's outstretched body - almost shimmering in the
brilliance of white sun-splendor.
"Don't overdo it," she had said at first, but Toran was of a dying-red star, Despite three years of
the Foundation, sunlight was a luxury, and for four days now his skin, treated beforehand for
ray resistance, had not felt the harshness of clothing, except for the brief shorts.
Bayta huddled close to him on the sand and they spoke in whispers.
Toran's voice was gloomy, as it drifted upwards from a relaxed face, "No, I admit we're
nowhere. But where is he? Who is he? This mad world says nothing of him. Perhaps he doesn't
exist."
"He exists," replied Bayta, with lips that didn't move. "He's clever, that's all. And your uncle is
right. He's a man we could use - if there's time."
A short pause. Toran whispered, "Know what I've been doing, Bay? I'm just daydreaming
myself into a sun-stupor. Things figure themselves out so neatly - so sweetly." His voice nearly
trailed off, then returned, "Remember the way Dr. Amann talked back at college, Bay. The
Foundation can never lose, but that does not mean the rulers of the Foundation can't. Didn't the
real history of the Foundation begin when Salvor Hardin kicked out the Encyclopedists and took
over the planet Terminus as the first mayor? And then in the next century, didn't Hober Mallow
gain power by methods almost as drastic? That's twice the rulers were defeated, so it can be
done. So why not by us?"
"It's the oldest argument in the books. Torie. What a waste of good reverie."
"Is it? Follow it out. What's Haven? Isn't it part of the Foundation? If we become top dog, it's still
the Foundation winning, and only the current rulers losing."
"Lots of difference between 'we can' and 'we will.' You're just jabbering."
Toran squirmed. "Nuts, Bay, you're just in one of your sour, green moods. What do you want to
spoil my fun for? I'll just go to sleep if you don't mind."
But Bayta was craning her head, and suddenly - quite a non sequitur - she giggled, and
removed her glasses to look down the beach with only her palm shading her eyes.
Toran looked up, then lifted and twisted his shoulders to follow her glance.
Apparently, she was watching a spindly figure, feet in air, who teetered on his hands for the
amusement of a haphazard crowd. It was one of the swarming acrobatic beggars of the shore,
whose supple joints bent and snapped for the sake of the thrown coins.
A beach guard was motioning him on his way and with a surprising one-handed balance, the
clown brought a thumb to his nose in an upside-down gesture. The guard advanced
threateningly and reeled backward with a foot in his stomach. The clown righted himself without
interrupting the motion of the initial kick and was away, while the frothing guard was held off by
a thoroughly unsympathetic crowd.
The clown made his way raggedly down the beach. He brushed past many, hesitated often,
stopped nowhere. The original crowd had dispersed. The guard had departed.
"He's a queer fellow," said Bayta, with amusement, and Toran agreed indifferently. The clown
was close enough now to be seen clearly. His thin face drew together in front into a nose of
generous planes and fleshy tip that seemed all but prehensile. His long, lean limbs and spidery
body, accentuated by his costume, moved easily and with grace, but with just a suggestion of
having been thrown together at random.
To look was to smile.
The clown seemed suddenly aware of their regard, for he stopped after he had passed, and,
with a sharp turn, approached. His large, brown eyes fastened upon Bayta.
She found herself disconcerted.
The clown smiled, but it only saddened his beaked face, and when he spoke it was with the
soft, elaborate phrasing of the Central Sectors.
"Were I to use the wits the good Spirits gave me," he said, "then I would say this lady can not
exist - for what sane man would hold a dream to be reality. Yet rather would I not be sane and
lend belief to charmed, enchanted eyes."
Bayta's own eyes opened wide. She said, "Wow!"
Toran laughed, "Oh, you enchantress. Go ahead, Bay, that deserves a five-credit piece. Let
him have it."
But the clown was forward with a jump. "No, my lady, mistake me not. I spoke for money not at
all, but for bright eyes and sweet face."
"Well, thanks," then, to Toran, "Golly, you think the sun's in his eyes?"
"Yet not alone for eyes and face," babbled the clown, as his words hurled past each other in
heightened frenzy, "but also for a mind, clear and sturdy - and kind as well."
Toran rose to his feet, reached for the white robe he had crooked his arm about for four days,
and slipped into it.
"Now, bud," he said, "suppose you tell me what you want, and stop annoying the lady."
The clown fell back a frightened step, his meager body cringing. "Now, sure I meant no harm. I
am a stranger here, and it's been said I am of addled wits; yet there is something in a face that I
can read. Behind this lady's fairness, there is a heart that's kind, and that would help me in my
trouble for all I speak so boldly."
"Will five credits cure your trouble?" said Toran, dryly, and held out the coin.
But the clown did not move to take it, and Bayta said, "Let me talk to him, Torie," She added
swiftly, and in an undertone, "There's no use being annoyed at his silly way of talking. That's
just his dialect; and our speech is probably as strange to him."
She said, "What is your trouble? You're not worried about the guard, are you? He won't bother
you."
"Oh, no, not he. He's but a windlet that blows the dust about my ankles. There is another that I
flee, and he is a storm that sweeps the worlds aside and throws them plunging at each other. A
week ago, I ran away, have slept in city streets, and hid in city crowds. I've looked in many
faces for help in need. I find it here." He repeated the last phrase in softer, anxious tones, and
his large eyes were troubled, "I find it here."
"Now," said Bayta, reasonably, "I would like to help, but really, friend, I'm no protection against
a world-sweeping storm. To be truthful about it, I could use-"
There was an uplifted, powerful voice that bore down upon them.
"Now, then, you mud-spawned rascal-"
It was the beach guard, with a fire-red face, and snarling mouth, that approached at a run. He
pointed with his low-power stun pistol.
"Hold him, you two. Don't let him get away." His heavy hand fell upon the clown's thin shoulder,
so that a whimper was squeezed out of him.
Toran said, "What's he done?"
"What's he done? What's he done? Well, now, that's good!" The guard reached inside the
dangling pocket attached to his belt, and removed a purple handkerchief, with which he
mopped his bare neck. He said with relish. "I'll tell you what he's done. He's run away. The
word's all over Kalgan and I would have recognized him before this if he had been on his feet
instead of on his hawkface top." And he rattled his prey in a fierce good humor.
Bayta said with a smile, "Now where did he escape from, sir?"
The guard raised his voice. A crowd was gathering, popeyed and jabbering, and with the
increase of audience, the guard's sense of importance increased in direct ratio.
"Where did he escape from?" he declaimed in high sarcasm. "Why, I suppose you've heard of
the Mule, now."
All jabbering stopped, and Bayta felt a sudden iciness trickle down into her stomach. The clown
had eyes only for her-he still quivered in the guard's brawny grasp.
"And who," continued the guard heavily, "would this infernal ragged piece be, but his lordship's
own court fool who's run away." He jarred his captive with a massive shake, "Do you admit it,
fool?"
There was only white fear for answer, and the soundless sibilance of Bayta's voice close to
Toran's ear.
Toran stepped forward to the guard in friendly fashion, "Now, my man, suppose you take your
hand away for just a while. This entertainer you hold has been dancing for us and has not yet
danced out his fee."
"Here!" The guard's voice rose in sudden concern. "There's a reward-"
"You'll have it, if you can prove he's the man you want. Suppose you withdraw till then. You
know that you're interfering with a guest, which could be serious for you."
"But you're interfering with his lordship and that will be serious for you." He shook the clown
once again. "Return the man's fee, carrion."
Toran's hand moved quickly and the guard's stun pistol was wrenched away with half a finger
nearly following it. The guard howled his pain and rage. Toran shoved him violently aside, and
the clown, unhanded, scuttled behind him.
The crowd, whose fringes were now lost to the eye, paid little attention to the latest
development. There was among them a craning of necks, and a centrifugal motion as if many
had decided to increase their distance from the center of activity.
Then there was a bustle, and a rough order in the distance. A corridor formed itself and two
men strode through, electric whips in careless readiness. Upon each purple blouse was
designed an angular shaft of lightning with a splitting planet underneath.
A dark giant, in lieutenant's uniform, followed them; dark of skin, and hair, and scowl.
The dark man spoke with the dangerous softness that meant he had little need of shouting to
enforce his whims. He said, "Are you the man who notified us?"
The guard was still holding his wrenched hand, and with a pain-distorted face mumbled, "I
claim the reward, your mightiness, and I accuse that man-"
"You'll get your reward," said the lieutenant, without looking at him. He motioned curtly to his
men, "Take him."
Toran felt the clown tearing at his robe with a maddened grip.
He raised his voice and kept it from shaking, "I'm sorry, lieutenant; this man is mine."
The soldiers took the statement without blinking. One raised his whip casually, but the
lieutenant's snapped order brought it down.
His dark mightiness swung forward and planted his square body before Toran, "Who are you?"
And the answer rang out, "A citizen of the Foundation."
It worked-with the crowd, at any rate. The pent-up silence broke into an intense hum. The
Mule's name might excite fear, but it was, after all, a new name and scarcely stuck as deeply in
the vitals as the old one of the Foundation - that had destroyed the Empire - and the fear of
which ruled a quadrant of the Galaxy with ruthless despotism.
The lieutenant kept face. He said, "Are you aware of the identity of the man behind you?"
"I have been told he's a runaway from the court of your leader, but my only sure knowledge is
that he is a friend of mine. You'll need firm proof of his identity to take him."
There were high-pitched sighs from the crowd, but the lieutenant let it pass. "Have you your
papers of Foundation citizenship with you?"
"At my ship."
"You realize that your actions are illegal? I can have you shot."
"Undoubtedly. But then you would have shot a Foundation citizen and it is quite likely that your
body would be sent to the Foundation - quartered - as part compensation. It's been done by
other warlords."
The lieutenant wet his lips. The statement was true.
He said, "Your name?"
Toran followed up his advantage, "I will answer further questions at my ship. You can get the
cell number at the Hangar; it is registered under the name 'Bayta'."
"You won't give up the runaway?"
"To the Mule, perhaps. Send your master!"
The conversation had degenerated to a whisper and the lieutenant turned sharply away.
"Disperse the crowd!" he said to his men, with suppressed ferocity.
The electric whips rose and fell. There were shrieks and a vast surge of separation and flight.
Toran interrupted his reverie only once on their way back to the Hangar. He said, almost to
himself, "Galaxy, Bay, what a time I had! I was so scared-"
"Yes," she said, with a voice that still shook, and eyes that still showed something akin to
worship, "it was quite out of character."
"Well, I still don't know what happened. I just got up there with a stun pistol that I wasn't even
sure I knew how to use, and talked back to him. I don't know why I did it."
He looked across the aisle of the short-run air vessel that was carrying them out of the beach
area, to the seat on which the Mule's clown scrunched up in sleep, and added distastefully, "It
was the hardest thing I've ever done."
The lieutenant stood respectfully before the colonel of the garrison, and the colonel looked at
him and said, "Well done. Your part's over now."
But the lieutenant did not retire immediately. He said darkly, "The Mule has lost face before a
mob, sir. It will be necessary to undertake disciplinary action to restore proper atmosphere of
respect."
"Those measures have already been taken."
The lieutenant half turned, then, almost with resentment, "I'm willing to agree, sir, that orders
are orders, but standing before that man with his stun pistol and swallowing his insolence
whole, was the hardest thing I've ever done."
14. THE MUTANT
The "hangar" on Kalgan is an institution peculiar unto itself, born of the need for the disposition
of the vast number of ships brought in by the visitors from abroad, and the simultaneous and
consequent vast need for living accommodations for the same. The original bright one who had
thought of the obvious solution had quickly become a millionaire. His heirs - by birth or finance
- were easily among the richest on Kalgan.
The "hangar" spreads fatly over square miles of territory, and "hangar" does not describe it at
all sufficiently. It is essentially a hotel - for ships. The traveler pays in advance and his ship is
awarded a berth from which it can take off into space at any desired moment. The visitor then
lives in his ship as always. The ordinary hotel services such as the replacement of food and
medical supplies at special rates, simple servicing of the ship itself, special intra-Kalgan
transportation for a nominal sum are to be had, of course.
As a result, the visitor combines hangar space and hotel bill into one, at a saving. The owners
sell temporary use of ground space at ample profits. The government collects huge taxes.
Everyone has fun. Nobody loses. Simple!
The man who made his way down the shadow-borders of the wide corridors that connected the
multitudinous wings of the "hangar" had in the past speculated on the novelty and usefulness of
the system described above, but these were reflections for idle moments - distinctly unsuitable
at present.
The ships hulked in their height and breadth down the long lines of carefully aligned cells, and
the man discarded line after line. He was an expert at what he was doing now and if his
preliminary study of the hangar registry had failed to give specific information beyond the
doubtful indication of a specific wing - one containing hundreds of ships - his specialized
knowledge could winnow those hundreds into one.
There was the ghost of a sigh in the silence, as the man stopped and faded down one of the
lines; a crawling insect beneath the notice of the arrogant metal monsters that rested there.
Here and there the sparkling of light from a porthole would indicate the presence of an early
returner from the organized pleasures to simpler - or more private - pleasures of his own.
The man halted, and would have smiled if he ever smiled. Certainly the convolutions of his
brain performed the mental equivalent of a smile.
The ship he stopped at was sleek and obviously fast. The peculiarity of its design was what he
wanted. It was not a usual model - and these days most of the ships of this quadrant of the
Galaxy either imitated Foundation design or were built by Foundation technicians. But this was
special. This was a Foundation ship - if only because of the tiny bulges in the skin that were
the nodes of the protective screen that only a Foundation ship could possess. There were other
indications, too.
The man felt no hesitation.
The electronic barrier strung across the line of the ships as a concession to privacy on the part
of the management was not at all important to him. It parted easily, and without activating the
alarm, at the use of the very special neutralizing force he had at his disposal.
So the first knowledge within the ship of the intruder without was the casual and almost friendly
signal of the muted buzzer in the ship's living room that was the result of a palm placed over the
little photocell just one side of the main air lock.
And while that successful search went on, Toran and Bayta felt only the most precarious
security within the steel walls of the Bayta. The Mule's clown who had reported that within his
narrow compass of body he held the lordly name of Magnifico Giganticus, sat hunched over the
table and gobbled at the food set before him.
His sad, brown eyes lifted from his meat only to follow Bayta's movements in the combined
kitchen and larder where he ate.
"The thanks of a weak one are of but little value," he muttered, "but you have them, for truly, in
this past week, little but scraps have come my way - and for all my body is small, yet is my
appetite unseemly great."
"Well, then, eat!" said Bayta, with a smile. "Don't waste your time on thanks. Isn't there a
Central Galaxy proverb about gratitude that I once heard?"
"Truly there is, my lady. For a wise man, I have been told, once said, 'Gratitude is best and
most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.' But alas, my lady, I am but a
mass of empty phrases, it would seem. When my empty phrases pleased the Mule, it brought
me a court dress, and a grand name - for, see you, it was originally simply Bobo, one that
pleases him not - and then when my empty phrases pleased him not, it would bring upon my
poor bones beatings and whippings."
Toran entered from the pilot room, "Nothing to do now but wait, Bay. I hope the Mule is capable
of understanding that a Foundation ship is Foundation territory."
Magnifico Giganticus, once Bobo, opened his eyes wide and exclaimed, "How great is the
Foundation before which even the cruel servants of the Mule tremble."
"Have you heard of the Foundation, too?" asked Bayta, with a little smile.
"And who has not?" Magnifico's voice was a mysterious whisper. "There are those who say it is
a world of great magic, of fires that can consume planets, and secrets of mighty strength. They
say that not the highest nobility of the Galaxy could achieve the honor and deference
considered only the natural due of a simple man who could say 'I am a citizen of the
Foundation,' - were he only a salvage miner of space, or a nothing like myself."
Bayta said, "Now, Magnifico, you'll never finish if you make speeches. Here, I'll get you a little
flavored milk. It's good."
She placed a pitcher of it upon the table and motioned Toran out of the room.
"Torie, what are we going to do now - about him?" and she motioned towards the kitchen.
"How do you mean?"
"If the Mule comes, are we going to give him up?"
"Well, what else, Bay?" He sounded harassed, and the gesture with which he shoved back the
moist curl upon his forehead testified to that.
He continued impatiently, "Before I came here I had a sort of vague idea that all we had to do
was to ask for the Mule, and then get down to business - just business, you know, nothing
definite."
"I know what you mean, Torie. I wasn't much hoping to see the Mule myself, but I did think we
could pick up some firsthand knowledge of the mess, and then pass it over to people who know
a little more about this interstellar intrigue. I'm no storybook spy."
"You're not behind me, Bay." He folded his arms and frowned. "What a situation! You'd never
know there was a person like the Mule, except for this last queer break. Do you suppose he'll
come for his clown?"
Bayta looked up at him. "I don't know that I want him to. I don't know what to say or do. Do
you?"
The inner buzzer sounded with its intermittent burring noise. Bayta's lips moved wordlessly,
"The Mule!"
Magnifico was in the doorway, eyes wide, his voice a whimper, "The Mule?"
Toran murmured, "I've got to let them in."
A contact opened the air lock and the outer door closed behind the newcomer. The scanner
showed only a single shadowed figure.
"It's only one person," said Toran, with open relief, and his voice was almost shaky as he bent
toward the signal tube, "Who are you?"
"You'd better let me in and find out, hadn't you?" The words came thinly out the receiver.
"I'll inform you that this is a Foundation ship and consequently Foundation territory by
international treaty."
"I know that."
"Come with your arms free, or I'll shoot. I'm well-armed."
"Done!"
Toran opened the inner door and closed contact on his blast pistol, thumb hovering over the
pressure point. There was the sound of footsteps and then the door swung open, and Magnifico
cried out, "It's not the Mule. It's but a man."
The "man" bowed to the clown somberly, "Very accurate. I'm not the Mule." He held his hands
apart, "I'm not armed, and I come on a peaceful errand. You might relax and put the blast pistol
away. Your hand isn't steady enough for my peace of mind."
"Who are you?" asked Toran, brusquely.
"I might ask you that," said the stranger, coolly, "since you're the one under false pretenses, not
I."
"How so?"
"You're the one who claims to be a Foundation citizen when there's not an authorized Trader
on the planet."
"That's not so. How would you know?"
"Because I am a Foundation citizen, and have my papers to prove it. Where are yours?"
"I think you'd better get out."
"I think not. If you know anything about Foundation methods, and despite your imposture you
might, you'd know that if I don't return alive to my ship at a specified time, there'll be a signal at
the nearest Foundation headquarters so I doubt if your weapons will have much effect,
practically speaking."
There was an irresolute silence and then Bayta said, calmly, "Put the blaster away, Toran, and
take him at face value. He sounds like the real thing."
"Thank you," said the stranger.
Toran put his gun on the chair beside him, "Suppose you explain all this now."
The stranger remained standing. He was long of bone and large of limb. His face consisted of
hard flat planes and it was somehow evident that he never smiled. But his eyes lacked
hardness.
He said, "News travels quickly, especially when it is apparently beyond belief. I don't suppose
there's a person on Kalgan who doesn't know that the Mule's men were kicked in the teeth
today by two tourists from the Foundation. I knew of the important details before evening, and,
as I said, there are no Foundation tourists aside from myself on the planet. We know about
those things."
Who are the 'we'?
"'We' are - 'we'! Myself for one! I knew you were at the Hangar - you had been overheard to
say so. I had my ways of checking the registry, and my ways of finding the ship."
He turned to Bayta suddenly, "You're from the Foundation - by birth, aren't you?"
"Am I?"
"You're a member of the democratic opposition - they call it 'the underground.' I don't
remember your name, but I do the face. You got out only recently - and wouldn't have if you
were more important."
Bayta shrugged, "You know a lot."
"I do. You escaped with a man. That one?"
"Does it matter what I say?"
"No. I merely want a thorough mutual understanding. I believe that the password during the
week you left so hastily was 'Seldon, Hardin, and Freedom.' Porfirat Hart was your section
leader. "
"Where'd you get that?" Bayta was suddenly fierce. "Did the police get him?" Toran held her
back, but she shook herself loose and advanced.
The man from the Foundation said quietly, "Nobody has him. It's just that the underground
spreads widely and in queer places. I'm Captain Han Pritcher of Information, and I'm a section
leader myself - never mind under what name."
He waited, then said, "No, you don't have to believe me. In our business it is better to overdo
suspicion than the opposite. But I'd better get past the preliminaries."
"Yes," said Toran, "suppose you do."
"May I sit down? Thanks." Captain Pritcher swung a long leg across his knee and let an arm
swing loose over the back of the chair. "I'll start out by saying that I don't know what all this is
about - from your angle. You two aren't from the Foundation, but it's not a hard guess that
you're from one of the independent Trading worlds. That doesn't bother me overmuch. But out
of curiosity, what do you want with that fellow, that clown you snatched to safety? You're risking
your life to hold on to him."
"I can't tell you that."
"Hm-m-m. Well, I didn't think you would. But if you're waiting for the Mule himself to come
behind a fanfarade of horns, drums, and electric organs - relax! The Mule doesn't work that
way."
"What?" It came from both Toran and Bayta, and in the comer where Magnifico lurked with ears
almost visibly expanded, there was a sudden joyful start.
"That's right. I've been trying to contact him myself, and doing a rather more thorough job of it
than you two amateurs can. It won't work. The man makes no personal appearance, does not
allow himself to be photographed or simulated, and is seen only by his most intimate
associates."
"Is that supposed to explain your interest in us, captain?" questioned Toran.
"No. That clown is the key. That clown is one of the very few that have seen him. I want him.
He may be the proof I need - and I need something, Galaxy knows - to awaken the
Foundation."
"It needs awakening?" broke in Bayta with sudden sharpness. "Against what? And in what role
do you act as alarm, that of rebel democrat or of secret police and provocateur?"
The captain's face set in its hard lines. "When the entire Foundation is threatened, Madame
Revolutionary, both democrats and tyrants perish. Let us save the tyrants from a greater, that
we may overthrow them in their turn."
"Who's the greater tyrant you speak of?" flared Bayta.
"The Mule! I know a bit about him, enough to have been my death several times over already, if
I had moved less nimbly. Send the clown out of the room. This will require privacy."
"Magnifico," said Bayta, with a gesture, and the clown left without a sound.
The captain's voice was grave and intense, and low enough so that Toran and Bayta drew
close.
He said, "The Mule is a shrewd operator - far too shrewd not to realize the advantage of the
magnetism and glamour of personal leadership. If he gives that up, it's for a reason. That
reason must be the fact that personal contact would reveal something that is of overwhelming
importance not to reveal."
He waved aside questions, and continued more quickly, "I went back to his birthplace for this,
and questioned people who for their knowledge will not live long. Few enough are still alive.
They remember the baby born thirty years before - the death of his mother - his strange youth.
The Mule is not a human being!"
And his two listeners drew back in horror at the misty implications. Neither understood, fully or
clearly, but the menace of the phrase was definite.
The captain continued, "He is a mutant, and obviously from his subsequent career, a highly
successful one. I don't know his powers or the exact extent to which he is what our thrillers
would call a 'superman,' but the rise from nothing to the conqueror of Kalgan's warlord in two
years is revealing. You see, don't you, the danger? Can a genetic accident of unpredictable
biological properties be taken into account in the Seldon plan?"
Slowly, Bayta spoke, "I don't believe it. This is some sort of complicated trickery. Why didn't the
Mule's men kill us when they could have, if he's a superman?"
"I told you that I don't know the extent of his mutation. He may not be ready, yet, for the
Foundation, and it would be a sign of the greatest wisdom to resist provocation until ready. Now
let me speak to the clown."
The captain faced the trembling Magnifico, who obviously distrusted this huge, hard man who
faced him.
The captain began slowly, "Have you seen the Mule with your own eyes?"
"I have but too well, respected sir. And felt the weight of his arm with my own body as well."
"I have no doubt of that. Can you describe him?"
"It is frightening to recall him, respected sir. He is a man of mighty frame. Against him, even you
would be but a spindling. His hair is of a burning crimson, and with all my strength and weight I
could not pull down his arm, once extended - not a hair's thickness." Magnifico's thinness
seemed to collapse upon itself in a huddle of arms and legs. "Often, to amuse his generals or to
amuse only himself, he would suspend me by one finger in my belt from a fearful height, while I
chattered poetry. It was only after the twentieth verse that I was withdrawn, and each
improvised and each a perfect rhyme, or else start over. He is a man of overpowering might,
respected sir, and cruel in the use of his power - and his eyes, respected sir, no one sees."
"What? What's that last?"
"He wears spectacles, respected sir, of a curious nature. It is said that they are opaque and that
he sees by a powerful magic that far transcends human powers. I have heard," and his voice
was small and mysterious, "that to see his eyes is to see death; that he kills with his eyes,
respected sir."
Magnifico's eyes wheeled quickly from one watching face to another. He quavered, "It is true.
As I live, it is true. "
Bayta drew a long breath, "Sounds like you're right, captain. Do you want to take over?"
"Well, let's look at the situation. You don't owe anything here? The hangar's barrier above is
free?"
"I can leave any time."
"Then leave. The Mule may not wish to antagonize the Foundation, but he runs a frightful risk in
letting Magnifico get away. It probably accounts for the hue and cry after the poor devil in the
first place. So there may be ships waiting for you upstairs. If you're lost in space, who's to pin
the crime?"
"You're right," agreed Toran, bleakly.
"However, you've got a shield and you're probably speedier than anything they've got, so as
soon as you're clear of the atmosphere make the circle in neutral to the other hemisphere, then
just cut a track outwards at top acceleration."
"Yes," said Bayta coldly, "and when we are back on the Foundation, what then, captain?"
"Why, you are then co-operative citizens of Kalgan, are you not? I know nothing to the contrary,
do I?"
Nothing was said. Toran turned to the controls. There was an imperceptible lurch.
It was when Toran had left Kalgan sufficiently far in the rear to attempt his first interstellar jump,
that Captain Pritcher's face first creased slightly - for no ship of the Mule had in any way
attempted to bar their leaving.
"Looks like he's letting us carry off Magnifico," said Toran. "Not so good for your story."
"Unless," corrected the captain, "he wants us to carry him off, in which case it's not so good for
the Foundation."
It was after the last jump, when within neutral-flight distance of the Foundation, that the first
hyperwave news broadcast reached the ship.
And there was one news item barely mentioned. It seemed that a warlord - unidentified by the
bored speaker - had made representations to the Foundation concerning the forceful abduction
of a member of his court. The announcer went on to the sports news.
Captain Pritcher said icily, "He's one step ahead of us after all." Thoughtfully, he added, "He's
ready for the Foundation, and he uses this as an excuse for action. It makes things more
difficult for us. We will have to act before we are really ready."
15. THE PSYCHOLOGIST
There was reason to the fact that the element known as "pure science" was the freest form of
life on the Foundation. In a Galaxy where the predominance - and even survival - of the
Foundation still rested upon the superiority of its technology - even despite its large access of
physical power in the last century and a half - a certain immunity adhered to The Scientist. He
was needed, and he knew it.
Likewise, there was reason to the fact that Ebling Mis - only those who did not know him added
his titles to his name - was the freest form of life in the "pure science" of the Foundation. In a
world where science was respected, he was The Scientist - with capital letters and no smile.
He was needed, and he knew it.
And so it happened, that when others bent their knee, he refused and added loudly that his
ancestors in their time bowed no knee to any stinking mayor. And in his ancestors' time the
mayor was elected anyhow, and kicked out at will, and that the only people that inherited
anything by right of birth were the congenital idiots.
So it also happened, that when Ebling Mis decided to allow Indbur to honor him with an
audience, he did not wait for the usual rigid line of command to pass his request up and the
favored reply down, but, having thrown the less disreputable of his two formal jackets over his
shoulders and pounded an odd hat of impossible design on one side of his head, and lit a
forbidden cigar into the bargain, he barged past two ineffectually bleating guards and into the
mayor's palace.
The first notice his excellence received of the intrusion was when from his garden he heard the
gradually nearing uproar of expostulation and the answering bull-roar of inarticulate swearing.
Slowly, Indbur lay down his trowel; slowly, he stood up; and slowly, he frowned. For Indbur
allowed himself a daily vacation from work, and for two hours in the early afternoon, weather
permitting, he was in his garden. There in his garden, the blooms grew in squares and
triangles, interlaced in a severe order of red and yellow, with little dashes of violet at the apices,
and greenery bordering the whole in rigid lines. There in his garden no one disturbed him - no
one!
Indbur peeled off his soil-stained gloves as he advanced toward the little garden door.
Inevitably, he said, "What is the meaning of this?"
It is the precise question and the precise wording thereof that has been put to the atmosphere
on such occasions by an incredible variety of men since humanity was invented. It is not
recorded that it has ever been asked for any purpose other than dignified effect.
But the answer was literal this time, for Mis's body came plunging through with a bellow, and a
shake of a fist at the ones who were still holding tatters of his cloak.
Indbur motioned them away with a solemn, displeased frown, and Mis bent to pick up his ruin of
a hat, shake about a quarter of the gathered dirt off it, thrust it under his armpit and say:
"Look here, Indbur, those unprintable minions of yours will be charged for one good cloak. Lots
of good wear left in this cloak." He puffed and wiped his forehead with just a trace of
theatricality.
The mayor stood stiff with displeasure, and said haughtily from the peak of his five-foot-two, "It
has not been brought to my attention, Mis, that you have requested an audience. You have
certainly not been assigned one."
Ebling Mis looked down at his mayor with what was apparently shocked disbelief, "Ga-LAX-y,
Indbur, didn't you get my note yesterday? I handed it to a flunky in purple uniform day before. I
would have handed it to you direct, but I know how you like formality."
"Formality!" Indbur turned up exasperated eyes. Then, strenuously, "Have you ever heard of
proper organization? At all future times you are to submit your request for an audience,
properly made out in triplicate, at the government office intended for the purpose. You are then
to wait until the ordinary course of events brings you notification of the time of audience to be
granted. You are then to appear, properly clothed - properly clothed, do you understand - and
with proper respect, too. You may leave."
"What's wrong with my clothes?" demanded Mis, hotly. "Best cloak I had till those unprintable
fiends got their claws on it. I'll leave just as soon as I deliver what I came to deliver. "Ga-LAX-y,
if it didn't involve a Seldon Crisis, I would leave right now."
"Seldon crisis!" Indbur exhibited first interest. Mis was a great psychologist - a democrat, boor,
and rebel certainly, but a psychologist, too. In his uncertainty, the mayor even failed to put into
words the inner pang that stabbed suddenly when Mis plucked a casual bloom, held it to his
nostrils expectantly, then flipped it away with a wrinkled nose.
Indbur said coldly, "Would you follow me? This garden wasn't made for serious conversation."
He felt better in his built-up chair behind his large desk from which he could look down on the
few hairs that quite ineffectually hid Mis's pink scalp-skin. He felt much better when Mis cast a
series of automatic glances about him for a non-existent chair and then remained standing in
uneasy shifting fashion. He felt best of all when in response to a careful pressure of the correct
contact, a liveried underling scurried in, bowed his way to the desk, and laid thereon a bulky,
metal-bound volume.
"Now, in order," said Indbur, once more master of the situation, "to make this unauthorized
interview as short as possible, make your statement in the fewest possible words."
Ebling Mis said unhurriedly, "You know what I'm doing these days?"
"I have your reports here," replied the mayor, with satisfaction, "together with authorized
summaries of them. As I understand it, your investigations into the mathematics of
psychohistory have been intended to duplicate Hari Seldon's work and, eventually, trace the
projected course of future history, for the use of the Foundation."
"Exactly," said Mis, dryly. "When Seldon first established the Foundation, he was wise enough
to include no psychologists among the scientists placed here - so that the Foundation has
always worked blindly along the course of historical necessity. In the course of my researches, I
have based a good deal upon hints found at the Time Vault."
"I am aware of that, Mis. It is a waste of time to repeat."
"I'm not repeating," blared Mis, "because what I'm going to tell you isn't in any of those reports."
"How do you mean, not in the reports?" said Indbur, stupidly. "How could-"
"Ga-LAX-y, Let me tell this my own way, you offensive little creature. Stop putting words into
my mouth and questioning my every statement or I'll tramp out of here and let everything
crumble around you. Remember, you unprintable fool, the Foundation will come through
because it must, but if I walk out of here now - you won't."
Dashing his hat on the floor, so that clods of earth scattered, he sprang up the stairs of the dais
on which the wide desk stood and shoving papers violently, sat down upon a comer of it.
Indbur thought frantically of summoning the guard, or using the built-in blasters of his desk. But
Mis's face was glaring down upon him and there was nothing to do but cringe the best face
upon it.
"Dr. Mis," he began, with weak formality, "you must-"
"Shut up," said Mis, ferociously, "and listen. If this thing here," and his palm came down heavily
on the metal of the bound data, "is a mess of my reports - throw it out. Any report I write goes
up through some twenty-odd officials, gets to you, and then sort of winds down through twenty
more. That's fine if there's nothing you don't want kept secret. Well, I've got something
confidential here. It's so confidential, even the boys working for me haven't got wind of it. They
did the work, of course, but each just a little unconnected piece - and I put it together. You
know what the Time Vault is?
Indbur nodded his head, but Mis went on with loud enjoyment of the situation, "Well, I'll tell you
anyhow because I've been sort of imagining this unprintable situation for a "Ga-LAX-y, of a long
time; I can read your mind, you puny fraud. You've got your hand right near a little knob that'll
call in about five hundred or so armed men to finish me off, but you're afraid of what I know -
you're afraid of a Seldon Crisis. Besides which, if you touch anything on your desk, I'll knock
your unprintable head off before anyone gets here. You and your bandit father and pirate
grandfather have been blood-sucking the Foundation long enough anyway."
"This is treason," gabbled Indbur.
"It certainly is," gloated Mis, "but what are you going to do about it? Let me tell you about the
Time Vault. That Time Vault is what Hari Seldon placed here at the beginning to help us over
the rough spots. For every crisis, Seldon has prepared a personal simulacrum to help - and
explain. Four crises so far - four appearances. The first time he appeared at the height of the
first crisis. The second time, he appeared at the moment just after the successful evolution of
the second crisis. Our ancestors were there to listen to him both times. At the third and fourth
crises, he was ignored - probably because he was not needed, but recent investigations -not
included in those reports you have - indicate that he appeared anyway, and at the proper
times. Get it?"
Fie did not wait for any answer. His cigar, a tattered, dead ruin was finally disposed of, a new
cigar groped for, and lit. The smoke puffed out violently.
Fie said, "Officially I've been trying to rebuild the science of psychohistory. Well, no one man is
going to do that, and it won't get done in any one century, either. But I've made advances in the
more simple elements and I've been able to use it as an excuse to meddle with the Time Vault.
What I have done, involves the determination, to a pretty fair kind of certainty, of the exact date
of the next appearance of Hari Seldon. I can give you the exact day, in other words, that the
coming Seldon Crisis, the fifth, will reach its climax. "
"Flow far off?" demanded Indbur, tensely.
And Mis exploded his bomb with cheerful nonchalance,
"Four months," he said. "Four unprintable months, less two days."
"Four months," said Indbur, with uncharacteristic vehemence. "Impossible."
"Impossible, my unprintable eye."
"Four months? Do you understand what that means? For a crisis to come to a head in four
months would mean that it has been preparing for years."
"And why not? Is there a law of Nature that requires the process to mature in the full light of
day?"
"But nothing impends. Nothing hangs over us." Indbur almost wrung his hands for anxiety. With
a sudden spasmodic recrudescence of ferocity, he screamed, "Will you get off my desk and let
me put it in order? How do you expect me to think?"
Mis, startled, lifted heavily and moved aside.
Indbur replaced objects in their appropriate niches with a feverish motion. He was speaking
quickly, "You have no right to come here like this. If you had presented your theory-"
"It is not a theory. "
"I say it is a theory. If you had presented it together with your evidence and arguments, in
appropriate fashion, it would have gone to the Bureau of Historical Sciences. There it could
have been properly treated, the resulting analyses submitted to me, and then, of course, proper
action would have been taken. As it is, you've vexed me to no purpose. Ah, here it is."
He had a sheet of transparent, silvery paper in his hand which he shook at the bulbous
psychologist beside him.
"This is a short summary I prepare myself - weekly - of foreign matters in progress. Listen -
we have completed negotiations for a commercial treaty with Mores, continue negotiations for
one with Lyonesse, sent a delegation to some celebration or other on Bonde, received some
complaint or other from Kalgan and we've promised to look into it, protested some sharp trade
practices in Asperta and they've promised to look into it - and so on and so on." The mayor's
eyes swarmed down the list of coded notations, and then he carefully placed the sheet in its
proper place in the proper folder in the proper pigeonhole.
I tell you, Mis, there's not a thing there that breathes anything but order and peace-"
The door at the far, long end opened, and, in far too dramatically coincident a fashion to
suggest anything but real life, a plainly-costumed notable stepped in.
Indbur half-rose. He had the curiously swirling sensation of unreality that comes upon those
days when too much happens. After Mis's intrusion and wild turnings there now came the
equally improper, hence disturbing, intrusion unannounced, of his secretary, who at least knew
the rules.
The secretary kneeled low.
Indbur said, sharply, "Well!"
The secretary addressed the floor, "Excellence, Captain Han Pritcher of Information, returning
from Kalgan, in disobedience to your orders, has according to prior instructions - your order
X20-513 - been imprisoned, and awaits execution. Those accompanying him are being held for
questioning. A full report has been filed."
Indbur, in agony, said, "A full report has been received. Well!"
"Excellence, Captain Pritcher has reported, vaguely, dangerous designs on the part of the new
warlord of Kalgan. He has been given, according to prior instructions - your order X20-651 - no
formal hearing, but his remarks have been recorded and a full report filed."
Indbur screamed, "A full report has been received. Well!"
"Excellence, reports have within the quarter-hour been received from the Salinnian frontier.
Ships identified as Kalganian have been entering Foundation territory, unauthorized. The ships
are armed. Fighting has occurred."
The secretary was bent nearly double. Indbur remained standing. Ebling Mis shook himself,
clumped up to the secretary, and tapped him sharply on the shoulder.
"Flere, you'd better have them release this Captain Pritcher, and have him sent here. Get out."
The secretary left, and Mis turned to the mayor, "Fladn't you better get the machinery moving,
Indbur? Four months, you know."
Indbur remained standing, glaze-eyed. Only one finger seemed alive - and it traced rapid jerky
triangles on the smooth desk top before him.
16. CONFERENCE
When the twenty-seven independent Trading worlds, united only by their distrust of the mother
planet of the Foundation, concert an assembly among themselves, and each is big with a pride
grown of its smallness, hardened by its own insularity and embittered by eternal danger - there
are preliminary negotiations to be overcome of a pettiness sufficiently staggering to heartsicken
the most persevering.
It is not enough to fix in advance such details as methods of voting, type of representation -
whether by world or by population. These are matters of involved political importance. It is not
enough to fix matters of priority at the table, both council and dinner, those are matters of
involved social importance.
It was the place of meeting - since that was a matter of overpowering provincialism. And in the
end the devious routes of diplomacy led to the world of Radole, which some commentators had
suggested at the start for logical reason of central position.
Radole was a small world - and, in military potential, perhaps the weakest of the twenty-seven.
That, by the way, was another factor in the logic of the choice.
It was a ribbon world - of which the Galaxy boasts sufficient, but among which, the inhabited
variety is a rarity for the physical requirements are difficult to meet. It was a world, in other
words, where the two halves face the monotonous extremes of heat and cold, while the region
of possible life is the girdling ribbon of the twilight zone.
Such a world invariably sounds uninviting to those who have not tried it, but there exist spots,
strategically placed - and Radole City was located in such a one.
It spread along the soft slopes of the foothills before the hacked-out mountains that backed it
along the rim of the cold hemisphere and held off the frightful ice. The warm, dry air of the
sun-half spilled over, and from the mountains was piped the water-and between the two,
Radole City became a continuous garden, swimming in the eternal morning of an eternal June.
Each house nestled among its flower garden, open to the fangless elements. Each garden was
a horticultural forcing ground, where luxury plants grew in fantastic patterns for the sake of the
foreign exchange they brought - until Radole had almost become a producing world, rather
than a typical Trading world.
So, in its way, Radole City was a little point of softness and luxury on a horrible planet - a tiny
scrap of Eden - and that, too, was a factor in the logic of the choice.
The strangers came from each of the twenty-six other Trading worlds: delegates, wives,
secretaries, newsmen, ships, and crews - and Radole's population nearly doubled and
Radole's resources strained themselves to the limit. One ate at will, and drank at will, and slept
not at all.
Yet there were few among the roisterers who were not intensely aware that all that volume of
the Galaxy burnt slowly in a sort of quiet, slumbrous war. And of those who were aware, there
were dime classes. First, there were the many who knew little and were very confident.
Such as the young space pilot who wore the Haven cockade on the clasp of his cap, and who
managed, in holding his glass before his eyes, to catch those of the faintly smiling Radolian girl
opposite. He was saying:
"We came fight through the war-zone to get here-on purpose. We traveled about a light-minute
or so, in neutral, right past Horleggor-"
"Horleggor?" broke in a long-legged native, who was playing host to that particular gathering.
"That's where the Mule got the guts beat out of him last week, wasn't it?"
"Where'd you hear that the Mule got the guts beat out of him?" demanded the pilot, loftily.
"Foundation radio."
"Yeah? Well, the Mule's got Horleggor. We almost ran into a convoy of his ships, and that's
where they were coming from. It isn't a gut-beating when you stay where you fought, and the
gut-beater leaves in a hurry."
Someone else said in a high, blurred voice, "Don't talk like that. Foundation always takes it on
the chin for a while. You watch; just sit tight and watch. 01' Foundation knows when to come
back. And then - pow T The thick voice concluded and was succeeded by a bleary grin.
"Anyway." said the pilot from Haven, after a short pause, "As I say, we saw the Mule's ships,
and they looked pretty good, pretty good. I tell you what - they looked new."
"New?" said the native, thoughtfully. "They build them themselves?" He broke a leaf from an
overhanging branch, sniffed delicately at it, then crunched it between his teeth, the bruised
tissues bleeding greenly and diffusing a minty odor. He said, "You trying to tell me they beat
Foundation ships with homebuilt jobs? Go on."
"We saw them, doc. And I can tell a ship from a comet, too, you know."
The native leaned close. "You know what I think. Listen, don't kid yourself. Wars don't just start
by themselves, and we have a bunch of shrewd apples running things. They know what they're
doing."
The well-unthirsted one said with sudden loudness, "You watch ol' Foundation. They wait for
the last minute, then - powf' He grinned with vacuously open mouth at the girl, who moved
away from him.
The Radolian was saying, "For instance, old man, you think maybe that this Mule guy's running
things. No-o-o." And he wagged a finger horizontally. "The way I hear it, and from pretty high
up, mind you, he's our boy. We're paying him off, and we probably built those ships. Let's be
realistic about it - we probably did. Sure, he can't beat the Foundation in the long run, but he
can get them shaky, and when he does - we get in."
The girl said, "Is that all you can talk about, Kiev? The war? You make me tired."
The pilot from Haven said, in an access of gallantry,
"Change the subject. Can't make the girls tired."
The bedewed one took up the refrain and banged a mug to the rhythm. The little groups of two
that had formed broke up with giggles and swagger, and a few similar groups of twos emerged
from the sun-house in the background.
The conversation became more general, more varied, more meaningless.
Then there were those who knew a little more and were less confident.
Such as the one-armed Fran, whose large bulk represented Haven as official delegated, and
who lived high in consequence, and cultivated new friendships - with women when he could
and with men when he had to.
It was on the sun platform of the hilltop home, of one of these new friends, that he relaxed for
the first of what eventually proved to be a total of two times while on Radole. The new friend
was Iwo Lyon, a kindred soul of Radole. Iwo's house was apart from the general cluster,
apparently alone in a sea of floral perfume and insect chatter. The sun platform was a grassy
strip of lawn set at a forty-five degree angle, and upon it Fran stretched out and fairly sopped
up sun.
He said, "Don't have anything like this on Haven."
Iwo replied, sleepily, "Ever seen the cold side. There's a spot twenty miles from here where the
oxygen runs like water. "
"Go on.
"Fact."
"Well, I'll tell you, Iwo-ln the old days before my arm was chewed off I knocked around, see -
and you won't believe this, but" - The story that followed lasted considerably, and Iwo didn't
believe it.
Iwo said, through yawns, "They don't make them like in the old days, that's the truth.
"No, guess they don't. Well, now," Fran fired up, "don't say that. I told you about my son, didn't
I? He's one of the old school, if you like. He'll make a great Trader, blast it. He's his old man up
and down. Up and down, except that he gets married."
"You mean legal contract? With a girl?"
"That's right. Don't see the sense in it myself. They went to Kalgan for their honeymoon."
"Kalgan? Kalgan? When the Galaxy was this?"
Fran smiled broadly, and said with slow meaning, "Just before the Mule declared war on the
Foundation."
"That so?"
Fran nodded and motioned Iwo closer with his head. He said, hoarsely, "In fact, I can tell you
something, if you don't let it go any further. My boy was sent to Kalgan for a purpose. Now I
wouldn't like to let it out, you know, just what the purpose was, naturally, but you look at the
situation now, and I suppose you can make a pretty good guess. In any case, my boy was the
man for the job. We Traders needed some sort of ruckus." He smiled, craftily. "It's here. I'm not
saying how we did it, but - my boy went to Kalgan, and the Mule sent out his ships. My son!"
Iwo was duly impressed. He grew confidential in his turn, "That's good. You know, they say
we've got five hundred ships ready to pitch in on our own at the right time. "
Fran said authoritatively, "More than that, maybe. This is real strategy. This is the kind I like."
He clawed loudly at the skin of his abdomen. "But don't you forget that the Mule is a smart boy,
too. What happened at Horleggor worries me."
"I heard he lost about ten ships."
"Sure, but he had a hundred more, and the Foundation had to get out. It's all to the good to
have those tyrants beaten, but not as quickly as all that." He shook his head.
"The question I ask is where does the Mule get his ships? There's a widespread rumor we're
making them for him."
"We? The Traders? Haven has the biggest ship factories anywhere in the independent worlds,
and we haven't made one for anyone but ourselves. Do you suppose any world is building a
fleet for the Mule on its own, without taking the precaution of united action? That's a ... a fairy
tale."
"Well, where does he get them?"
And Fran shrugged, "Makes them himself, I suppose. That worries me, too."
Fran blinked at the sun and curled his toes about the smooth wood of the polished foot-rest.
Slowly, he fell asleep and the soft burr of his breathing mingled with the insect sibilance.
Lastly, there were the very few who knew considerable and were not confident at all.
Such as Randu, who on the fifth day of the all-Trader convention entered the Central Hall and
found the two men he had asked to be there, waiting for him. The five hundred seats were
empty - and were going to stay so.
Randu said quickly, almost before he sat down, "We three represent about half the military
potential of the Independent Trading Worlds."
"Yes," said Mangin of Iss, "my colleague and I have already commented upon the fact."
"I am ready," said Randu, "to speak quickly and earnestly. I am not interested in bargaining or
subtlety. Our position is radically in the worse."
"As a result of-" urged Ovall Gri of Mnemon.
"Of developments of the last hour. Please! From the beginning. First, our position is not of our
doing, and but doubtfully of our control. Our original dealings were not with the Mule, but with
several others; notably the ex-warlord of Kalgan, whom the Mule defeated at a most
inconvenient time for us."
"Yes, but this Mule is a worthy substitute," said Mangin. "I do not cavil at details."
"You may when you know all the details." Randu leaned forward and placed his hands upon the
table palms-up in an obvious gesture.
Fie said, "A month ago I sent my nephew and my nephew's wife to Kalgan."
"Your nephew!" cried Ovall Gri, in surprise. "I did not know he was your nephew."
"With what purpose," asked Mangin, dryly. "This?" And his thumb drew an inclusive circle high
in the air.
"No. If you mean the Mule's war on the Foundation, no. Flow could I aim so high? The young
man knew nothing - neither of our organization nor of our aims. Fie was told I was a minor
member of an intra-Flaven patriotic society, and his function at Kalgan was nothing but that of
an amateur observer. My motives were, I must admit, rather obscure. Mainly, I was curious
about the Mule. Fie is a strange phenomenon - but that's a chewed cud; I'll not go into it.
Secondly, it would make an interesting and educational training project for a man who had
experience with the Foundation and the Foundation underground and showed promise of future
usefulness to us. You see-"
Ovall's long face fell into vertical lines as he showed his large teeth, "You must have been
surprised at the outcome, then, since there is not a world among the Traders, I believe, that
does not know that this nephew of yours abducted a Mule underling in the name of the
Foundation and furnished the Mule with a casus belli. Galaxy, Randu, you spin romances. I find
it hard to believe you had no hand in that. Come, it was a skillful job."
Randu shook his white head, "Not of my doing. Nor, willfully, of my nephew's, who is now held
prisoner at the Foundation, and may not live to see the completion of this so-skillful job. I have
just heard from him. The Personal Capsule has been smuggled out somehow, come through
the war zone, gone to Haven, and traveled from there to here. It has been a month on its
travels."
And?-'
Randu leaned a heavy hand upon the heel of his palm and said, sadly, "I'm afraid we are cast
for the same role that the onetime warlord of Kalgan played. The Mule is a mutant!"
There was a momentary qualm; a faint impression of quickened heartbeats. Randu might easily
have imagined it.
When Mangin spoke, the evenness of his voice was unchanged, "How do you know?"
"Only because my nephew says so, but he was on Kalgan.
"What kind of a mutant? There are all kinds, you know."
Randu forced the rising impatience down, "All kinds of mutants, yes, Mangin. All kinds! But only
one kind of Mule. What kind of a mutant would start as an unknown, assemble an army,
establish, they say, a five-mile asteroid as original base, capture a planet, then a system, then
a region - and then attack the Foundation, and defeat them at Horleggor. And all in two or
three years!"
Ovall Gri shrugged, "So you think he'll beat the Foundation?"
"I don't know. Suppose he does?"
"Sorry, I can't go that far. You don't beat the Foundation. Look, there's not a new fact we have
to go on except for the statements of a ... well, of an inexperienced boy. Suppose we shelve it
for a while. With all the Mule's victories, we weren't worried until now, and unless he goes a
good deal further than he has, I see no reason to change that. Yes?"
Randu frowned and despaired at the cobweb texture of his argument. He said to both, "Have
we yet made any contact with the Mule?"
"No," both answered.
"It's true, though, that we've tried, isn't it? It's true that there's not much purpose to our meeting
unless we do reach him, isn't it? It's true that so far there's been more drinking than thinking,
and more wooing than doing - I quote from an editorial in today's Radole Tribune - and all
because we can't reach the Mule. Gentlemen, we have nearly a thousand ships waiting to be
thrown into the fight at the proper moment to seize control of the Foundation. I say we should
change that. I say, throw those thousand onto the board now - against the Mule."
"You mean for the Tyrant Indbur and the bloodsuckers of the Foundation?" demanded Mangin,
with quiet venom.
Randu raised a weary hand, "Spare me the adjectives. Against the Mule, I say, and for
l-don't-care-who."
Ovall Gri rose, "Randu, I'll have nothing to do with that, You present it to the full council tonight
if you particularly hunger for political suicide."
He left without another word and Mangin followed silently, leaving Randu to drag out a lonely
hour of endless, insoluble consideration.
At the full council that night, he said nothing.
But it was Ovall Gri who pushed into his room the next morning; an Ovall Gri only sketchily
dressed and who had neither shaved nor combed his hair.
Randu stared at him over a yet-uncleared breakfast table with an astonishment sufficiently
open and strenuous to cause him to drop his pipe.
Ovall said baldly, harshly. "Mnemon has been bombarded from space by treacherous attack."
Randu's eyes narrowed, "The Foundation?"
"The Mule!" exploded Ovall. "The Mule!" His words raced, "It was unprovoked and deliberate.
Most of our fleet had joined the international flotilla. The few left as Home Squadron were
insufficient and were blown out of the sky. There have been no landings yet, and there may not
be, for half the attackers are reported destroyed - but it is war - and I have come to ask how
Haven stands on the matter."
"Haven, I am sure, will adhere to the spirit of the Charter of Federation. But, you see? He
attacks us as well."
"This Mule is a madman. Can he defeat the universe?" He faltered and sat down to seize
Randu's wrist, "Our few survivors have reported the Mule's poss ... enemy's possession of a
new weapon. A nuclear-field depressor."
"A what?"
Ovall said, "Most of our ships were lost because their nuclear weapons failed them. It could not
have happened by either accident or sabotage. It must have been a weapon of the Mule. It
didn't work perfectly; the effect was intermittent; there were ways to neutralize - my dispatches
are not detailed. But you see that such a tool would change the nature of war and, possibly,
make our entire fleet obsolete."
Randu felt an old, old man. His face sagged hopelessly, "I am afraid a monster is grown that
will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him."
17. THE VISI-SONOR
Ebling Mis's house in a not-so-pretentious neighborhood of Terminus City was well known to
the intelligentsia, literati, and just-plain-well-read of the Foundation. Its notable characteristics
depended, subjectively, upon the source material that was read. To a thoughtful biographer, it
was the "symbolization of a retreat from a nonacademic reality," a society columnist gushed
silkily at its "frightfully masculine atmosphere of careless disorder," a University Ph.D. called it
brusquely, "bookish, but unorganized," a nonuniversity friend said, "good for a drink anytime
and you can put your feet on the sofa," and a breezy newsweekly broadcast, that went in for
color, spoke of the "rocky, down-to-earth, no-nonsense living quarters of blaspheming, Leftish,
balding Ebling Mis."
To Bayta, who thought for no audience but herself at the moment, and who had the advantage
of first-hand information, it was merely sloppy.
Except for the first few days, her imprisonment had been a light burden. Far lighter, it seemed,
that this half-hour wait in the psychologist's home - under secret observation, perhaps? She
had been with Toran then, at least.
Perhaps she might have grown wearier of the strain, had not Magnifico's long nose drooped in
a gesture that plainly showed his own far greater tension.
Magnifico's pipe-stem legs were folded up under a pointed, sagging chin, as if he were trying to
huddle himself into disappearance, and Bayta's hand went out in a gentle and automatic
gesture of reassurance. Magnifico winced, then smiled.
"Surely, my lady, it would seem that even yet my body denies the knowledge of my mind and
expects of others' hands a blow."
"There's no need for worry, Magnifico. I'm with you, and I won't let anyone hurt you."
The clown's eyes sidled towards her, then drew away quickly. "But they kept me away from you
earlier - and from your kind husband - and, on my word, you may laugh, but I was lonely for
missing friendship."
"I wouldn't laugh at that. I was, too."
The clown brightened, and he hugged his knees closer. He said, "You have not met this man
who will see us?" It was a cautious question.
"No. But he is a famous man. I have seen him in the newscasts and heard quite a good deal of
him. I think he's a good man, Magnifico, who means us no harm."
"Yes?" The clown stirred uneasily. "That may be, my lady, but he has questioned me before,
and his manner is of an abruptness and loudness that bequivers me. He is full of strange
words, so that the answers to his questions could not worm out of my throat. Almost, I might
believe the romancer who once played on my ignorance with a tale that, at such moments, the
heart lodged in the windpipe and prevented speech."
"But it's different now. We're two to his one, and he won't be able to frighten the both of us, will
he?"
"No, my lady."
A door slammed somewheres, and the roaring of a voice entered the house. Just outside the
room, it coagulated into words with a fierce, "Get the "Ga-LAX-y out of here!" and two
uniformed guards were momentarily visible through the opening door, in quick retreat.
Ebling Mis entered frowning, deposited a carefully wrapped bundle on the floor, and
approached to shake Bayta's hand with careless pressure. Bayta returned it vigorously,
man-fashion. Mis did a double-take as he turned to the clown, and favored the girl with a longer
look.
He said, "Married?"
"Yes. We went through the legal formalities."
Mis paused. Then, "Happy about it?"
"So far."
Mis shrugged, and turned again to Magnifico. He unwrapped the package, "Know what this is,
boy?"
Magnifico fairly hurled himself out of his seat and caught the multi-keyed instrument. He
fingered the myriad knobby contacts and threw a sudden back somersault of joy, to the
imminent destruction of the nearby furniture.
He croaked, "A Visi-Sonor - and of a make to distill joy out of a dead man's heart." His long
fingers caressed softly and slowly, pressing lightly on contacts with a rippling motion, resting
momentarily on one key then another - and in the air before them there was a soft glowing
rosiness, just inside the range of vision.
Ebling Mis said, "All right, boy, you said you could pound on one of those gadgets, and there's
your chance. You'd better tune it, though. It's out of a museum." Then, in an aside to Bayta,
"Near as I can make it, no one on the Foundation can make it talk right."
He leaned closer and said quickly, "The clown won't talk without you. Will you help?"
She nodded.
"Good!" he said. "His state of fear is almost fixed, and I doubt that his mental strength would
possibly stand a psychic probe. If I'm to get anything out of him otherwise, he's got to feel
absolutely at ease. You understand?"
She nodded again.
"This Visi-Sonor is the first step in the process. He says he can play it; and his reaction now
makes it pretty certain that it's one of the great joys of his life. So whether the playing is good or
bad, be interested and appreciative. Then exhibit friendliness and confidence in me. Above all,
follow my lead in everything." There was a swift glance at Magnifico, huddled in a comer of the
sofa, making rapid adjustments in the interior of the instrument. He was completely absorbed.
Mis said in a conversational tone to Bayta, "Ever hear a Visi-Sonor?"
"Once," said Bayta, equally casually, "at a concert of rare instruments. I wasn't impressed."
"Well, I doubt that you came across good playing. There are very few really good players. It's
not so much that it requires physical co-ordination - a multi-bank piano requires more, for
instance - as a certain type of free-wheeling mentality." In a lower voice, "That's why our living
skeleton there might be better than we think. More often than not, good players are idiots
otherwise. It's one of those queer setups that makes psychology interesting."
He added, in a patent effort to manufacture light conversation, "You know how the beblistered
thing works? I looked it up for this purpose, and all I've made out so far is that its radiations
stimulate the optic center of the brain directly, without ever touching the optic nerve. It's actually
the utilization of a sense never met with in ordinary nature. Remarkable, when you come to
think of it. What you hear is all right. That's ordinary. Eardrum, cochlea, all that. But - Shh! He's
ready. Will you kick that switch. It works better in the dark."
In the darkness, Magnifico was a mere blob, Ebling Mis a heavy-breathing mass. Bayta found
herself straining her eyes anxiously, and at first with no effect. There was a thin, reedy quaver
in the air, that wavered raggedly up the scale. It hovered, dropped and caught itself, gained in
body, and swooped into a booming crash that had the effect of a thunderous split in a veiling
curtain.
A little globe of pulsing color grew in rhythmic spurts and burst in midair into formless gouts that
swirled high and came down as curving streamers in interfacing patterns. They coalesced into
little spheres, no two alike in color - and Bayta began discovering things.
She noticed that closing her eyes made the color pattern all the clearer; that each little
movement of color had its own little pattern of sound; that she could not identify the colors; and,
lastly, that the globes were not globes but little figures.
Little figures; little shifting flames, that danced and flickered in their myriads; that dropped out of
sight and returned from nowhere; that whipped about one another and coalesced then into a
new color.
Incongruously, Bayta thought of the little blobs of color that come at night when you close your
eyelids till they hurt, and stare patiently. There was the old familiar effect of the marching polka
dots of shifting color, of the contracting concentric circles, of the shapeless masses that quiver
momentarily. All that, larger, multivaried - and each little dot of color a tiny figure.
They darted at her in pairs, and she lifted her hands with a sudden gasp, but they tumbled and
for an instant she was the center of a brilliant snowstorm, while cold light slipped off her
shoulders and down her arm in a luminous ski-slide, shooting off her stiff fingers and meeting
slowly in a shining midair focus. Beneath it all, the sound of a hundred instruments flowed in
liquid streams until she could not tell it from the light.
She wondered if Ebling Mis were seeing the same thing, and if not, what he did see, The
wonder passed, and then-
She was watching again. The little figures-were they little figures? -little tiny women with
burning hair that turned and bent too quickly for the mind to focus? -seized one another in
star-shaped groups that turned - and the music was faint laughter - girls' laughter that began
inside the ear.
The stars drew together, sparked towards one another, grew slowly into structure - and from
below, a palace shot upward in rapid evolution. Each brick a tiny color, each color a tiny spark,
each spark a stabbing light that shifted patterns and led the eye skyward to twenty jeweled
minarets.
A glittering carpet shot out and about, whirling, spinning an insubstantial web that engulfed all
space, and from it luminous shoots stabbed upward and branched into trees that sang with a
music all their own.
Bayta sat inclosed in it. The music welled about her in rapid, lyrical flights. She reached out to
touch a fragile tree and blossoming spicules floated downwards and faded, each with its clear,
tiny tinkle.
The music crashed in twenty cymbals, and before her an area flamed up in a spout and
cascaded down invisible steps into Bayta's lap, where it spilled over and flowed in rapid current,
raising the fiery sparkle to her waist, while across her lap was a rainbow bridge and upon it the
little figures-
A palace, and a garden, and tiny men and women on a bridge, stretching out as far as she
could see, swimming through the stately swells of stringed music converging in upon her-
And then - there seemed a frightened pause, a hesitant, indrawn motion, a swift collapse. The
colors fled, spun into a globe that shrank, and rose, and disappeared.
And it was merely dark again.
A heavy foot scratched for the pedal, reached it, and the light flooded in; the flat light of a prosy
sun. Bayta blinked until the tears came, as though for the longing of what was gone. Ebling Mis
was a podgy inertness with his eyes still round and his mouth still open.
Only Magnifico himself was alive, and he fondled his Visi-Sonor in a crooning ecstasy.
"My lady," he gasped, "it is indeed of an effect the most magical. It is of balance and response
almost beyond hope in its delicacy and stability. On this, it would seem I could work wonders.
How liked you my composition, my lady?"
"Was it yours?" breathed Bayta. "Your own?"
At her awe, his thin face turned a glowing red to the tip of his mighty nose. "My very own, my
lady. The Mule liked it not, but often and often I have played it for my own amusement. It was
once, in my youth, that I saw the palace - a gigantic place of jeweled riches that I saw from a
distance at a time of high carnival. There were people of a splendor undreamed of - and
magnificence more than ever I saw afterwards, even in the Mule's service. It is but a poor
makeshift I have created, but my mind's poverty precludes more. I call it, 'The Memory of
Heaven.'"
Now through the midst of the chatter, Mis shook himself to active life. "Here," he said, "here,
Magnifico, would you like to do that same thing for others?"
For a moment, the clown drew back. "For others?" he quavered.
"For thousands," cried Mis, "in the great Halls of the Foundation. Would you like to be your own
master, and honored by all, wealthy, and ... and-" his imagination failed him. "And all that? Eh?
What do you say?"
"But how may I be all that, mighty sir, for indeed I am but a poor clown ungiven to the great
things of the world?"
The psychologist puffed out his lips, and passed the back of his hand across his brow. He said,
"But your playing, man. The world is yours if you would play so for the mayor and his Trading
Trusts. Wouldn't you like that?"
The clown glanced briefly at Bayta, "Would she stay with me?"
Bayta laughed, "Of course, silly. Would it be likely that I'd leave you now that you're on the point
of becoming rich and famous?"
"It would all be yours," he replied earnestly, "and surely the wealth of Galaxy itself would be
yours before I could repay my debt to your kindness."
"But," said Mis, casually, "if you would first help me-"
"What is that?"
The psychologist paused, and smiled, "A little surface probe that doesn't hurt. It wouldn't touch
but the peel of your brain."
There was a flare of deadly fear in Magnifico's eyes. "Not a probe. I have seen it used. It drains
the mind and leaves an empty skull. The Mule did use it upon traitors and let them wander
mindless through the streets, until out of mercy, they were killed." He held up his hand to push
Mis away.
"That was a psychic probe," explained Mis, patiently, "and even that would only harm a person
when misused. This probe I have is a surface probe that wouldn't hurt a baby. "
"That's right, Magnifico," urged Bayta. "It's only to help beat the Mule and keep him far away.
Once that's done, you and I will be rich and famous all our lives."
Magnifico held out a trembling hand, "Will you hold my hand, then?"
Bayta took it in both her own, and the clown watched the approach of the burnished terminal
plates with large eyes.
Ebling Mis rested carelessly on the too-lavish chair in Mayor Indbur's private quarters,
unregenerately unthankful for the condescension shown him and watched the small mayor's
fidgeting unsympathetically. He tossed away a cigar stub and spat out a shred of tobacco.
"And, incidentally, if you want something for your next concert at Mallow Hall, Indbur," he said,
"you can dump out those electronic gadgeteers into the sewers they came from and have this
little freak play the Visi-Sonor for you. Indbur - it's out of this world."
Indbur said peevishly, "I did not call you here to listen to your lectures on music. What of the
Mule? Tell me that. What of the Mule?"
"The Mule? Well, I'll tell you - I used a surface probe and got little. Can't use the psychic probe
because the freak is scared blind of it, so that his resistance will probably blow his unprintable
mental fuses as soon as contact is made. But this is what I've got, if you'll just stop tapping your
fingernails—
"First place, de-stress the Mule's physical strength. He's probably strong, but most of the freak's
fairy tales about it are probably considerably blown up by his own fearful memory, He wears
queer glasses and his eyes kill, he evidently has mental powers."
"So much we had at the start," commented the mayor, sourly.
"Then the probe confirms it, and from there on I've been working mathematically."
"So? And how long will all this take? Your word-rattling will deafen me yet."
"About a month, I should say, and I may have something for you. And I may not, of course. But
what of it? If this is all outside Seldon's plans, our chances are precious little, unprintable little."
Indbur whirled on the psychologist fiercely, "Now I have you, traitor. Lie! Say you're not one of
these criminal rumormongers that are spreading defeatism and panic through the Foundation,
and making my work doubly hard."
"I? I?" Mis gathered anger slowly.
Indbur swore at him, "Because by the dust-clouds of space, the Foundation will win - the
Foundation must win."
"Despite the loss at Horleggor?"
"It was not a loss. You have swallowed that spreading lie, too? We were outnumbered and
betreasoned-"
"By whom?" demanded Mis, contemptuously.
"By the lice-ridden democrats of the gutter," shouted Indbur back at him. "I have known for long
that the fleet has been riddled by democratic cells. Most have been wiped out, but enough
remain for the unexplained surrender of twenty ships in the thickest of the swarming fight.
Enough to force an apparent defeat.
"For that matter, my rough-tongued, simple patriot and epitome of the primitive virtues, what are
your own connections with the democrats?"
Ebling Mis shrugged it off, "You rave, do you know that? What of the retreat since, and the loss
of half of Siwenna? Democrats again?"
"No. Not democrats," the little man smiled sharply. "We retreat - as the Foundation has always
retreated under attack, until the inevitable march of history turns with us. Already, I see the
outcome. Already, the so-called underground of the democrats has issued manifestoes
swearing aid and allegiance to the Government. It could be a feint, a cover for a deeper
treachery, but I make good use of it, and the propaganda distilled from it will have its effect,
whatever the crawling traitors scheme. And better than that-"
"Even better than that, Indbur?"
"Judge for yourself. Two days ago, the so-called Association of Independent Traders declared
war on the Mule, and the Foundation fleet is strengthened, at a stroke, by a thousand ships.
You see, this Mule goes too far. He finds us divided and quarreling among ourselves and under
the pressure of his attack we unite and grow strong. He must lose. It is inevitable - as always."
Mis still exuded skepticism, "Then you tell me that Seldon planned even for the fortuitous
occurrence of a mutant."
"A mutant! I can't tell him from a human, nor could you but for the ravings of a rebel captain,
some outland youngsters, and an addled juggler and clown. You forget the most conclusive
evidence of all - your own."
"My own?" For just a moment, Mis was startled.
"Your own," sneered the mayor. "The Time Vault opens in nine weeks. What of that? It opens
for a crisis. If this attack of the Mule is not the crisis, where is the 'real' one, the one the Vault is
opening for? Answer me, you lardish ball."
The psychologist shrugged, "All tight. If it keeps you happy. Do me a favor, though. Just in case
... just in case old Seldon makes his speech and it does go sour, suppose you let me attend the
Grand Opening."
"All right. Get out of here. And stay out of my sight for nine weeks."
"With unprintable pleasure, you wizened horror," muttered Mis to himself as he left.
18. FALL OF THE FOUNDATION
There was an atmosphere about the Time Vault that just missed definition in several directions
at once. It was not one of decay, for it was well-lit and well-conditioned, with the color scheme
of the walls lively, and the rows of fixed chairs comfortable and apparently designed for eternal
use. It was not even ancient, for three centuries had left no obvious mark. There was certainly
no effort at the creation of awe or reverence, for the appointments were simple and everyday -
next door to bareness, in fact.
Yet after all the negatives were added and the sum disposed of, something was left - and that
something centered about the glass cubicle that dominated half the room with its clear
emptiness. Four times in three centuries, the living simulacrum of Hari Seldon himself had sat
there and spoken. Twice he had spoken to no audience.
Through three centuries and nine generations, the old man who had seen the great days of
universal empire projected himself - and still he understood more of the Galaxy of his
great-ultra-great-grandchildren, than did those grandchildren themselves.
Patiently that empty cubicle waited.
The first to arrive was Mayor Indbur III, driving his ceremonial ground car through the hushed
and anxious streets. Arriving with him was his own chair, higher than those that belonged there,
and wider. It was placed before all the others, and Indbur dominated all but the empty
glassiness before him.
The solemn official at his left bowed a reverent head. "Excellence, arrangements are completed
for the widest possible sub-etheric spread for the official announcement by your excellence
tonight."
"Good. Meanwhile, special interplanetary programs concerning the Time Vault are to continue.
There will, of course, be no predictions or speculations of any sort on the subject. Does popular
reaction continue satisfactory?"
"Excellence, very much so. The vicious rumors prevailing of late have decreased further.
Confidence is widespread."
"Good!" He gestured the man away and adjusted his elaborate neckpiece to a nicety.
It was twenty minutes of noon!
A select group of the great props of the mayoralty - the leaders of the great Trading
organizations - appeared in ones and twos with the degree of pomp appropriate to their
financial status and place in mayoral favor. Each presented himself to the mayor, received a
gracious word or two, took an assigned seat.
Somewhere, incongruous among the stilted ceremony of all this, Randu of Haven made his
appearance and wormed his way unannounced to the mayor's seat.
"Excellence!" he muttered, and bowed.
Indbur frowned. "You have not been granted an audience. "
"Excellence, I have requested one for a week."
"I regret that the matters of State involved in the appearance of Seldon have-"
"Excellence, I regret them, too, but I must ask you to rescind your order that the ships of the
Independent Traders be distributed among the fleets of the Foundation."
Indbur had flushed red at the interruption. "This is not the time for discussion."
"Excellence, it is the only time," Randu whispered urgently. "As representative of the
Independent Trading Worlds, I tell you such a move can not be obeyed. It must be rescinded
before Seldon solves our problem for us. Once the emergency is passed, it will be too late to
conciliate and our alliance will melt away."
Indbur stared at Randu coldly. "You realize that I am head of the Foundation armed forces?
Have I the right to determine military policy or have I not?"
"Excellence, you have, but some things are inexpedient."
"I recognize no inexpediency. It is dangerous to allow your people separate fleets in this
emergency. Divided action plays into the hands of the enemy. We must unite, ambassador,
militarily as well as politically."
Randu felt his throat muscles tighten. He omitted the courtesy of the opening title. "You feet
safe now that Seldon will speak, and you move against us. A month ago you were soft and
yielding, when our ships defeated the Mule at Terel. I might remind you, sir, that it is the
Foundation Fleet that has been defeated in open battle five times, and that the ships of the
Independent Trading Worlds have won your victories for you."
Indbur frowned dangerously, "You are no longer welcome upon Terminus, ambassador. Your
return will be requested this evening. Furthermore, your connection with subversive democratic
forces on Terminus will be - and has been - investigated."
Randu replied, "When I leave, our ships will go with me. I know nothing of your democrats. I
know only that your Foundation's ships have surrendered to the Mule by the treason of their
high officers, not their sailors, democratic or otherwise. I tell you that twenty ships of the
Foundation surrendered at Horleggor at the orders of their rear admiral, when they were
unharmed and unbeaten. The rear admiral was your own close associate - he presided at the
trial of my nephew when he first arrived from Kalgan. It is not the only case we know of and our
ships and men will not be risked under potential traitors.
Indbur said, "You will be placed under guard upon leaving here."
Randu walked away under the silent stares of the contemptuous coterie of the rulers of
Terminus.
It was ten minutes of twelve!
Bayta and Toran had already arrived. They rose in their back seats and beckoned to Randu as
he passed.
Randu smiled gently, "You are here after all. How did you work it?"
"Magnifico was our politician," grinned Toran. "Indbur insists upon his Visi-Sonor composition
based on the Time Vault, with himself, no doubt, as hero. Magnifico refused to attend without
us, and there was no arguing him out of it. Ebling Mis is with us, or was. He's wandering about
somewhere." Then, with a sudden access of anxious qravity, "Why, what's wronq, uncle? You
don't look well."
Randu nodded, "I suppose not. We're in for bad times, Toran. When the Mule is disposed of,
our turn will come, I'm afraid. "
A straight solemn figure in white approached, and greeted them with a stiff bow.
Bayta's dark eyes smiled, as she held out her hand, "Captain Pritcher! Are you on space duty
then?"
The captain took the hand and bowed lower, "Nothing like it. Dr. Mis, I understand, has been
instrumental in bringing me here, but it's only temporary. Back to home guard tomorrow. What
time is it?"
It was three minutes of twelve!
Magnifico was the picture of misery and heartsick depression. His body curled up, in his eternal
effort at self-effacement. His long nose was pinched at the nostrils and his large, down-slanted
eyes darted uneasily about.
He clutched at Bayta's hand, and when she bent down, he whispered, "Do you suppose, my
lady, that all these great ones were in the audience, perhaps, when I ... when I played the
Visi-Sonor?"
"Everyone, I'm sure," Bayta assured him, and shook him gently. "And I'm sure they all think
you're the most wonderful player in the Galaxy and that your concert was the greatest ever
seen, so you just straighten yourself and sit correctly. We must have dignity."
He smiled feebly at her mock-frown and unfolded his long-boned limbs slowly.
It was noon - and the glass cubicle was no longer empty.
It was doubtful that anyone had witnessed the appearance. It was a clean break; one moment
not there and the next moment there.
In the cubicle was a figure in a wheelchair, old and shrunken, from whose wrinkled face bright
eyes shone, and whose voice, as it turned out, was the livest thing about him. A book lay face
downward in his lap, and the voice came softly.
"I am Hari Seldon!"
He spoke through a silence, thunderous in its intensity.
"I am Hari Seldon! I do not know if anyone is here at all by mere sense-perception but that is
unimportant. I have few fears as yet of a breakdown in the Plan. For the first three centuries the
percentage probability of nondeviation is nine-four point two."
He paused to smile, and then said genially, "By the way, if any of you are standing, you may sit.
If any would like to smoke, please do. I am not here in the flesh. I require no ceremony.
"Let us take up the problem of the moment, then. For the first time, the Foundation has been
faced, or perhaps, is in the last stages of facing, civil war. Till now, the attacks from without
have been adequately beaten off, and inevitably so, according to the strict laws of
psychohistory. The attack at present is that of a too-undisciplined outer group of the Foundation
against the too-authoritarian central government. The procedure was necessary, the result
obvious."
The dignity of the high-born audience was beginning to break. Indbur was half out of his chair.
Bayta leaned forward with troubled eyes. What was the great Seldon talking about? She had
missed a few of the words-
"-that the compromise worked out is necessary in two respects. The revolt of the Independent
Traders introduces an element of new uncertainty in a government perhaps grown
over-confident. The element of striving is restored. Although beaten, a healthy increase of
democracy-"
There were raised voices now. Whispers had ascended the scale of loudness, and the edge of
panic was in them.
Bayta said in Toran's ear, "Why doesn't he talk about the Mule? The Traders never revolted."
Toran shrugged his shoulders.
The seated figure spoke cheerfully across and through the increasing disorganization:
"-a new and firmer coalition government was the necessary and beneficial outcome of the
logical civil war forced upon the Foundation. And now only the remnants of the old Empire
stand in the way of further expansion, and in them, for the next few years, at any rate, is no
problem. Of course, I can not reveal the nature of the next prob-"
In the complete uproar, Seldon's lips moved soundlessly.
Ebling Mis was next to Randu, face ruddy. He was shouting. "Seldon is off his rocker. He's got
the wrong crisis. Were your Traders ever planning civil war?"
Randu said thinly, "We planned one, yes. We called it off in the face of the Mule."
"Then the Mule is an added feature, unprepared for in Seldon's psychohistory. Now what's
happened?"
In the sudden, frozen silence, Bayta found the cubicle once again empty. The nuclear glow of
the walls was dead, the soft current of conditioned air absent.
Somewhere the sound of a shrill siren was rising and falling in the scale and Randu formed the
words with his lips, "Space raid!"
And Ebling Mis held his wrist watch to his ears and shouted suddenly, "Stopped, by the
"Ga-LAX-y, is there a watch in the room that is going?" His voice was a roar.
Twenty wrists went to twenty ears. And in far less than twenty seconds, it was quite certain that
none were.
"Then," said Mis, with a grim and horrible finality, "something has stopped all nuclear power in
the Time Vault - and the Mule is attacking."
Indbur's wail rose high above the noise, "Take your seats! The Mule is fifty parsecs distant."
"He was," shouted back Mis, "a week ago. Right now, Terminus is being bombarded."
Bayta felt a deep depression settle softly upon her. She felt its folds tighten close and thick,
until her breath forced its way only with pain past her tightened throat.
The outer noise of a gathering crowd was evident. The doors were thrown open and a harried
figure entered, and spoke rapidly to Indbur, who had rushed to him.
"Excellence," he whispered, "not a vehicle is running in the city, not a communication line to the
outside is open.
The Tenth Fleet is reported defeated and the Mule's ships are outside the atmosphere. The
general staff-"
Indbur crumpled, and was a collapsed figure of impotence upon the floor. In all that hall, not a
voice was raised now. Even the growing crowd without was fearful, but silent, and the horror of
cold panic hovered dangerously.
Indbur was raised. Wine was held to his lips. His lips moved before his eyes opened, and the
word they formed was, "Surrender!"
Bayta found herself near to crying - not for sorrow or humiliation, but simply and plainly out of a
vast frightened despair. Ebling Mis plucked at her sleeve. "Come, young lady-"
She was pulled out of her chair, bodily.
"We're leaving," he said, "and take your musician with you." The plump scientist's lips were
trembling and colorless.
"Magnifico," said Bayta, faintly. The clown shrank in horror. His eyes were glassy.
"The Mule," he shrieked. "The Mule is coming for me."
He thrashed wildly at her touch. Toran leaned over and brought his fist up sharply. Magnifico
slumped into unconsciousness and Toran carried him out potato-sack fashion.
The next day, the ugly, battle-black ships of the Mule poured down upon the landing fields of
the planet Terminus. The attacking general sped down the empty main street of Terminus City
in a foreign-made ground car that ran where a whole city of atomic cars still stood useless.
The proclamation of occupation was made twenty-four hours to the minute after Seldon had
appeared before the former mighty of the Foundation.
Of all the Foundation planets, only the Independent Traders still stood, and against them the
power of the Mule - conqueror of the Foundation - now turned itself.
19. START OF THE SEARCH
The lonely planet, Haven - only planet of an only sun of a Galactic Sector that trailed raggedly
off into intergalactic vacuum - was under siege.
In a strictly military sense, it was certainly under siege, since no area of space on the Galactic
side further than twenty parsecs distance was outside range of the Mule's advance bases. In
the four months since the shattering fall of the Foundation, Haven's communications had fallen
apart like a spiderweb under the razor's edge. The ships of Haven converged inwards upon the
home world, and only Haven itself was now a fighting base.
And in other respects, the siege was even closer; for the shrouds of helplessness and doom
had already invaded
Bayta plodded her way down the pink-waved aisle past the rows of milky plastic-topped tables
and found her seat by blind reckoning. She eased on to the high, armless chair, answered
half-heard greetings mechanically, rubbed a wearily-itching eye with the back of a weary hand,
and reached for her menu.
She had time to register a violent mental reaction of distaste to the pronounced presence of
various cultured-fungus dishes, which were considered high delicacies at Haven, and which her
Foundation taste found highly inedible - and then she was aware of the sobbing near her and
looked up.
Until then, her notice of Juddee, the plain, snub-nosed, indifferent blonde at the dining unit
diagonally across had been the superficial one of the nonacquaintance. And now Juddee was
crying, biting woefully at a moist handkerchief, and choking back sobs until her complexion was
blotched with turgid red. Her shapeless radiation-proof costume was thrown back upon her
shoulders, and her transparent face shield had tumbled forward into her dessert, and there
remained.
Bayta joined the three girls who were taking turns at the eternally applied and eternally
inefficacious remedies of shoulder-patting, hair-smoothing, and incoherent murmuring.
"What's the matter?" she whispered.
One turned to her and shrugged a discreet, "I don't know." Then, feeling the inadequacy of the
gesture, she pulled Bayta aside.
"She's had a hard day, I guess. And she's worrying about her husband."
"Is he on space patrol?"
"Yes".
Bayta reached a friendly hand out to Juddee.
"Why don't you go home, Juddee?" Her voice was a cheerfully businesslike intrusion on the
soft, flabby inanities that had preceded.
Juddee looked up half in resentment. "I've been out once this week already-"
"Then you'll be out twice. If you try to stay on, you know, you'll just be out three days next week
- so going home now amounts to patriotism. Any of you girls work in her department? Well,
then, suppose you take care of her card. Better go to the washroom first, Juddee, and get the
peaches and cream back where it belongs. Go ahead! Shoo!"
Bayta returned to her seat and took up the menu again with a dismal relief. These moods were
contagious. One weeping girl would have her entire department in a frenzy these nerve-torn
days.
She made a distasteful decision, pressed the correct buttons at her elbow and put the menu
back into its niche.
The tall, dark girl opposite her was saying, "Isn't much any of us can do except cry, is there?"
Her amazingly full lips scarcely moved, and Bayta noticed that their ends were carefully
touched to exhibit that artificial, just-so half-smile that was the current last word in
sophistication.
Bayta investigated the insinuating thrust contained in the words with lashed eyes and
welcomed the diversion of the arrival of her lunch, as the tile-top of her unit moved inward and
the food lifted. She tore the wrappings carefully off her cutlery and handled them gingerly till
they cooled.
She said, "Can't you think of anything else to do, Hella?"
"Oh, yes," said Hella. "/can!" She flicked her cigarette with a casual and expert finger-motion
into the little recess provided and the tiny flash caught it before it hit shallow bottom.
"For instance," and Hella clasped slender, well-kept hands under her chin, "I think we could
make a very nice arrangement with the Mule and stop all this nonsense. But then I don't have
the ... uh ... facilities to manage to get out of places quickly when the Mule takes over."
Bayta's clear forehead remained clear. Her voice was light and indifferent. "You don't happen to
have a brother or husband in the fighting ships, do you?"
"No. All the more credit that I see no reason for the sacrifice of the brothers and husbands of
others."
"The sacrifice will come the more surely for surrender."
"The Foundation surrendered and is at peace. Our men are away and the Galaxy is against
us."
Bayta shrugged, and said sweetly, "I'm afraid it is the first of the pair that bothers you." She
returned to her vegetable platter and ate it with the clammy realization of the silence about her.
No one in ear-shot had cared to answer Hella's cynicism.
She left quickly, after stabbing at the button which cleared her dining unit for the next shift's
occupant.
A new girl, three seats away, stage-whispered to Hella, "Who was she?"
Hella's mobile lips curled in indifference. "She's our coordinator's niece. Didn't you know that?"
"Yes?" Her eyes sought out the last glimpse of disappearing back. "What's she doing here?"
"Just an assembly girl. Don't you know it's fashionable to be patriotic? It's all so democratic, it
makes me retch."
"Now, Hella," said the plump girl to her right. "She's never pulled her uncle on us yet. Why don't
you lay off?"
Hella ignored her neighbor with a glazed sweep of eyes and lit another cigarette.
The new girl was listening to the chatter of the bright-eyed accountant opposite. The words
were coming quickly,
"-and she's supposed to have been in the Vault - actually in the Vault, you know - when
Seldon spoke - and they say the mayor was in frothing furies and there were riots, and all of
that sort of thing, you know. She got away before the Mule landed, and they say she had the
most tha-rilling escape - had to go through the blockade, and all - and I do wonder she doesn't
write a book about it, these war books being so popular these days, you know. And she was
supposed to be on this world of the Mule's, too - Kalgan, you know - and-"
The time bell shrilled and the dining room emptied slowly. The accountant's voice buzzed on,
and the new girl interrupted only with the conventional and wide-eyed, "Really-y-y-y?" at
appropriate points.
The huge cave lights were being shielded group-wise in the gradual descent towards the
darkness that meant sleep for the righteous and hard-working, when Bayta returned home.
Toran met her at the door, with a slice of buttered bread in his hand.
"Where've you been?" he asked, food-muffled. Then, more clearly, "I've got a dinner of sorts
rassled up. If it isn't much, don't blame me."
But she was circling him, wide-eyed. "Torie! Where's your uniform? What are you doing in
civvies?"
"Orders, Bay. Randu is holed up with Ebling Mis right now, and what it's all about, I don't know.
So there you have everything."
"Am I going?" She moved towards him impulsively.
He kissed her before he answered, "I believe so. It will probably be dangerous."
"What isn't dangerous?"
"Exactly. Oh, yes, and I've already sent for Magnifico, so he's probably coming too."
"You mean his concert at the Engine Factory will have to be cancelled."
"Obviously."
Bayta passed into the next room and sat down to a meal that definitely bore signs of having
been "rassled-up." She cut the sandwiches in two with quick efficiency and said:
"That's too bad about the concert. The girls at the factory were looking forward to it. Magnifico,
too, for that matter." She shook her head. "He's such a queer thing."
"Stirs your mother-complex, Bay, that's what he does. Some day we'll have a baby, and then
you'll forget Magnifico."
'Bayta answered from the depths of her sandwich, "Strikes me that you're all the stirring my
mother-complex can stand."
And then she laid the sandwich down, and was gravely serious in a moment.
"Torie."
"M-m-m?"
"Torie, I was at City Hall today - at the Bureau of Production. That is why I was so late today."
"What were you doing there?"
"Well..." she hesitated, uncertainly. "It's been building up. I was getting so I couldn't stand it at
the factory. Morale just doesn't exist. The girls go on crying jags for no particular reason. Those
who don't get sick become sullen. Even the little mousie types pout. In my particular section,
production isn't a quarter what it was when I came, and there isn't a day that we have a full
roster of workers."
"All right," said Toran, "tie in the B. of P. What did you do there?"
"Asked a few questions. And it's so, Torie, it's so all over Haven. Dropping production,
increasing sedition and disaffection. The bureau chief just shrugged his shoulders - after I had
sat in the anteroom an hour to see him, and only got in because I was the co-ordinator's niece
- and said it was beyond him. Frankly, I don't think he cared."
"Now, don't go off base, Bay."
"I don't think he did." She was strenuously fiery. "I tell you there's something wrong. It's that
same horrible frustration that hit me in the Time Vault when Seldon deserted us. You felt it
yourself."
"Yes, I did."
"Well, it's back," she continued savagely. "And we'll never be able to resist the Mule. Even if we
had the material, we lack the heart, the spirit, the will - Torie, there's no use fighting-"
Bayta had never cried in Toran's memory, and she did not cry now. Not really. But Toran laid a
light hand on her shoulder and whispered, "Suppose you forget it, baby. I know what you mean.
But there's nothing-"
"Yes, there's nothing we can do! Everyone says that - and we just sit and wait for the knife to
come down."
She returned to what was left of her sandwich and tea. Quietly, Toran was arranging the beds.
It was quite dark outside.
Randu, as newly-appointed co-ordinator - in itself a wartime post - of the confederation of
cities on Haven, had been assigned, at his own request, to an upper room, out of the window of
which he could brood over the roof tops and greenery of the city. Now, in the fading of the cave
lights, the city receded into the level lack of distinction of the shades. Randu did not care to
meditate upon the symbolism.
He said to Ebling Mis - whose clear, little eyes seemed to have no further interest than the
red-filled goblet in his hand - "There's a saying on Haven that when the cave lights go out, it is
time for the righteous and hard-working to sleep."
"Do you sleep much lately?"
"No! Sorry to call you so late, Mis. I like the night better somehow these days. Isn't that
strange? The people on Haven condition themselves pretty strictly on the lack of light meaning
sleep. Myself, too. But it's different now-"
"You're hiding," said Mis, flatly. "You're surrounded by people in the waking period, and you feel
their eyes and their hopes on you. You can't stand up under it. In the sleep period, you're free."
"Do you feel it, too, then? This miserable sense of defeat?"
Ebling Mis nodded slowly, "I do. It's a mass psychosis, an unprintable mob panic. "Ga-LAX-y,
Randu, what do you expect? Here you have a whole culture brought up to a blind, blubbering
belief that a folk hero of the past has everything all planned out and is taking care of every little
piece of their unprintable lives. The thought-pattern evoked has religious characteristics, and
you know what that means."
"Not a bit."
Mis was not enthusiastic about the necessity of explanation. He never was. So he growled,
stared at the long cigar he rolled thoughtfully between his fingers and said, "Characterized by
strong faith reactions. Beliefs can't be shaken short of a major shock, in which case, a fairly
complete mental disruption results. Mild cases-hysteria, morbid sense of insecurity. Advanced
cases - madness and suicide."
Randu bit at a thumbnail. "When Seldon fails us, in other words, our prop disappears, and
we've been leaning upon it so long, our muscles are atrophied to where we can not stand
without it."
"That's it. Sort of a clumsy metaphor, but that's it."
"And you, Ebling, what of your own muscles?"
The psychologist filtered a long draught of air through his cigar, and let the smoke laze out.
"Rusty, but not atrophied. My profession has resulted in just a bit of independent thinking."
"And you see a way out?"
"No, but there must be one. Maybe Seldon made no provisions for the Mule. Maybe he didn't
guarantee our victory. But, then, neither did he guarantee defeat. He's just out of the game and
we're on our own. The Mule can be licked."
"How?"
"By the only way anyone can be licked - by attacking in strength at weakness. See here,
Randu, the Mule isn't a superman. If he is finally defeated, everyone will see that for himself.
It's just that he's an unknown, and the legends cluster quickly. He's supposed to be a mutant.
Well, what of that? A mutant means a 'superman' to the ignoramuses of humanity. Nothing of
the sort.
"It's been estimated that several million mutants are born in the Galaxy every day. Of the
several million, all but one or two percent can be detected only by means of microscopes and
chemistry. Of the one or two percent macromutants, that is, those with mutations detectable to
the naked eye or naked mind, all but one or two percent are freaks, fit for the amusement
centers, the laboratories, and death. Of the few macromutants whose differences are to the
good, almost all are harmless curiosities, unusual in some single respect, normal - and often
subnormal - in most others. You see that, Randu?"
"I do. But what of the Mule?"
"Supposing the Mule to be a mutant then, we can assume that he has some attribute,
undoubtedly mental, which can be used to conquer worlds. In other respects, he undoubtedly
has his shortcomings, which we must locate. He would not be so secretive, so shy of others'
eyes, if these shortcomings were not apparent and fatal. If he's a mutant."
"Is there an alternative?"
"There might be. Evidence for mutation rests on Captain Han Pritcher of what used to be
Foundation's Intelligence. He drew his conclusions from the feeble memories of those who
claimed to know the Mule-or somebody who might have been the Mule - in infancy and early
childhood. Pritcher worked on slim pickings there, and what evidence he found might easily
have been planted by the Mule for his own purposes, for it's certain that the Mule has been
vastly aided by his reputation as a mutant-superman."
"This is interesting. How long have you thought that?"
"I never thought that, in the sense of believing it. It is merely an alternative to be considered.
For instance, Randu, suppose the Mule has discovered a form of radiation capable of
depressing mental energy just as he is in possession of one which depresses nuclear
reactions. What then, eh? Could that explain what's hitting us now - and what did hit the
Foundation?"
Randu seemed immersed in a near-wordless gloom.
He said, "What of your own researches on the Mule's clown."
And now Ebling Mis hesitated. "Useless as yet. I spoke bravely to the mayor previous to the
Foundation's collapse, mainly to keep his courage up - partly to keep my own up as well. But,
Randu, if my mathematical tools were up to it, then from the clown alone I could analyze the
Mule completely. Then we would have him. Then we could solve the queer anomalies that have
impressed me already."
"Such as?"
"Think, man. The Mule defeated the navies of the Foundation at will, but he has not once
managed to force the much weaker fleets of the Independent Traders to retreat in open
combat. The Foundation fell at a blow; the Independent Traders hold out against all his
strength. He first used Extinguishing Field upon the nuclear weapons of the Independent
Traders of Mnemon. The element of surprise lost them that battle but they countered the Field.
He was never able to use it successfully against the Independents again.
"But over and over again, it worked against Foundation forces. It worked on the Foundation
itself. Why? With our present knowledge, it is all illogical. So there must be factors of which we
are not aware."
Treachery?
"That's rattle-pated nonsense, Randu. Unprintable twaddle. There wasn't a man on the
Foundation who wasn't sure of victory. Who would betray a certain-to-win side."
Randu stepped to the curved window and stared unseeingly out into the unseeable. He said,
"But we're certain to lose now, if the Mule had a thousand weaknesses; if he were a network of
holes-"
He did not turn. It was as if the slump of his back, the nervous groping for one another of the
hands behind him that spoke. He said, "We escaped easily after the Time Vault episode,
Ebling. Others might have escaped as well. A few did. Most did not. The Extinguishing Field
could have been counteracted. It asked ingenuity and a certain amount of labor. All the ships of
the Foundation Navy could have flown to Haven or other nearby planets to continue the fight as
we did. Not one percent did so. In effect, they deserted to the enemy.
"The Foundation underground, upon which most people here seem to rely so heavily, has thus
far done nothing of consequence. The Mule has been politic enough to promise to safeguard
the property and profits of the great Traders and they have gone over to him."
Ebling Mis said stubbornly, "The plutocrats have always been against us."
"They always held the power, too. Listen, Ebling. We have reason to believe that the Mule or
his tools have already been in contact with powerful men among the Independent Traders. At
least ten of the twenty-seven Trading Worlds are known to have gone over to the Mule.
Perhaps ten more waver. There are personalities on Haven itself who would not be unhappy
over the Mule's domination. It's apparently an insurmountable temptation to give up
endangered political power, if that will maintain your hold over economic affairs. "
"You don't think Haven can fight the Mule?"
"I don't think Haven will." And now Randu turned his troubled face full upon the psychologist. "I
think Haven is waiting to surrender. It's what I called you here to tell you. I want you to leave
Haven."
Ebling Mis puffed up his plump checks in amazement. "Already?"
Randu felt horribly tired. "Ebling, you are the Foundation's greatest psychologist. The real
master-psychologists went out with Seldon, but you're the best we have. You're our only
chance of defeating the Mule. You can't do that here; you'll have to go to what's left of the
Empire."
"To Trantor?"
"That's right. What was once the Empire is bare bones today, but something must still be at the
center. They've got the records there, Ebling. You may learn more of mathematical psychology;
perhaps enough to be able to interpret the clown's mind. He will go with you, of course."
Mis responded dryly, "I doubt if he'd be willing to, even for fear of the Mule, unless your niece
went with him."
I know that. Toran and Bayta are leaving with you for that very reason. And, Ebling, there's
another, greater purpose. Hari Seldon founded two Foundations three centuries ago; one at
each end of the Galaxy. You must find that Second Foundation. "
20. CONSPIRATOR
The mayor's palace - what was once the mayor's palace - was a looming smudge in the
darkness. The city was quiet under its conquest and curfew, and the hazy milk of the great
Galactic Lens, with here and there a lonely star, dominated the sky of the Foundation.
In three centuries the Foundation had grown from a private project of a small group of scientists
to a tentacular trade empire sprawling deep into the Galaxy and half a year had flung it from its
heights to the status of another conquered province.
Captain Flan Pritcher refused to grasp that.
The city's sullen nighttime quiet, the darkened palace, intruder-occupied, were symbolic
enough, but Captain Flan Pritcher, just within the outer gate of the palace, with the tiny nuclear
bomb under his tongue, refused to understand.
A shape drifted closer - the captain bent his head.
The whisper came deathly low, "The alarm system is as it always was, captain. Proceed! It will
register nothing."
Softly, the captain ducked through the low archway, and down the fountain-lined path to what
had been Indbur's garden.
Four months ago had been the day in the Time Vault, the fullness of which his memory balked
at. Singly and separately the impressions would come back, unwelcome, mostly at night.
Old Seldon speaking his benevolent words that were so shatteringly wrong - the jumbled
confusion - Indbur, with his mayoral costume incongruously bright about his pinched,
unconscious face - the frightened crowds gathering quickly, waiting noiselessly for the
inevitable word of surrender - the young man, Toran, disappearing out of a side door with the
Mule's clown dangling over his shoulder.
And himself, somehow out of it all afterward, with his car unworkable.
Shouldering his way along and through the leaderless mob that was already leaving the city -
destination unknown.
Making blindly for the various rat holes which were - which had once been - the headquarters
for a democratic underground that for eighty years had been failing and dwindling.
And the rat holes were empty.
The next day, black alien ships were momentarily visible in the sky, sinking gently into the
clustered buildings of the nearby city. Captain Flan Pritcher felt an accumulation of
helplessness and despair drown him.
He started his travels in earnest.
In thirty days he had covered nearly two hundred miles on foot, changed to the clothing of a
worker in the hydroponic factories whose body he found newly-dead by the side of the road,
grown a fierce beard of russet intensity
And found what was left of the underground.
The city was Newton, the district a residential one of one-time elegance slowly edging towards
squalor, the house an undistinguished member of a row, and the man a small-eyed, big-boned
whose knotted fists bulged through his pockets and whose wiry body remained unbudgingly in
the narrow door opening.
The captain mumbled, "I come from Miran."
The man returned the gambit, grimly. "Miran is early this year."
The captain said, "No earlier than last year."
But the man did not step aside. He said, "Who are you?"
"Aren't you Fox?"
"Do you always answer by asking?"
The captain took an imperceptibly longer breath, and then said calmly, "I am Han Pritcher,
Captain of the Fleet, and member of the Democratic Underground Party. Will you let me in?"
The Fox stepped aside. He said, "My real name is Orum Palley."
He held out his hand. The captain took it.
The room was well-kept, but not lavish. In one comer stood a decorative book-film projector,
which to the captain's military eyes might easily have been a camouflaged blaster of
respectable caliber. The projecting lens covered the doorway, and such could be remotely
controlled.
The Fox followed his bearded guest's eyes, and smiled tightly. He said, "Yes! But only in the
days of Indbur and his lackey-hearted vampires. It wouldn't do much against the Mule, eh?
Nothing would help against the Mule. Are you hungry?"
The captain's jaw muscles tightened beneath his beard, and he nodded.
"It'll take a minute if you don't mind waiting." The Fox removed cans from a cupboard and
placed two before Captain Pritcher. "Keep your finger on it, and break them when they're hot
enough. My heat-control unit's out of whack. Things like that remind you there's a war on - or
was on, eh?"
His quick words had a jovial content, but were said in anything but a jovial tone - and his eyes
were coldly thoughtful. He sat down opposite the captain and said, "There'll be nothing but a
burn-spot left where you're sitting, if there's anything about you I don't like. Know that?"
The captain did not answer. The cans before him opened at a pressure.
The Fox said, shortly, "Stew! Sorry, but the food situation is short."
"I know," said the captain. He ate quickly; not looking up.
The Fox said, "I once saw you. I'm trying to remember, and the beard is definitely out of the
picture."
"I haven't shaved in thirty days." Then, fiercely, "What do you want? I had the correct
passwords. I have identification."
The other waved a hand, "Oh, I'll grant you're Pritcher all right. But there are plenty who have
the passwords, and the identifications, and the identities - who are with the Mule. Ever hear of
Levvaw, eh?"
"Yes."
"He's with the Mule."
"What? He-"
"Yes. He was the man they called 'No Surrender.'" The Fox's lips made laughing motions, with
neither sound nor humor. "Then there's Willig. With the Mule! Garre and Noth. With the Mule!
Why not Pritcher as well, eh? How would I know?"
The captain merely shook his head.
"But it doesn't matter," said the Fox, softly. "They must have my name, if Noth has gone over -
so if you're legitimate, you're in more new danger than I am over our acquaintanceship."
The captain had finished eating. He leaned back, "If you have no organization here, where can
I find one? The Foundation may have surrendered, but I haven't."
"So! You can't wander forever, captain. Men of the Foundation must have travel permits to
move from town to town these days. You know that? Also identity cards. You have one? Also,
all officers of the old Navy have been requested to report to the nearest occupation
headquarters. That's you, eh?"
"Yes." The captain's voice was hard. "Do you think I run through fear. I was on Kalgan not long
after its fall to the Mule. Within a month, not one of the old warlord's officers was at large,
because they were the natural military leaders of any revolt. It's always been the underground's
knowledge that no revolution can be successful without the control of at least part of the Navy.
The Mule evidently knows it, too."
The Fox nodded thoughtfully, "Logical enough. The Mule is thorough."
"I discarded the uniform as soon as I could. I grew the beard. Afterwards there may be a
chance that others have taken the same action."
Are you married?
"My wife is dead. I have no children.
"You're hostage-immune, then."
"Yes."
"You want my advice?"
"If you have any."
A don't know what the Mule's policy is or what he intends, but skilled workers have not been
harmed so far. Pay rates have gone up. Production of all sorts of nuclear weapons is booming."
"Yes? Sounds like a continuing offensive."
"I don't know. The Mule's a subtle son of a drab, and he may merely be soothing the workers
into submission. If Seldon couldn't figure him out with all his psychohistory, I'm not going to try.
But you're wearing work clothes. That suggests something, eh?"
"I'm not a skilled worker."
"You've had a military course in nucleics, haven't you?"
"Certainly."
"That's enough. The Nuclear-Field Bearings, Inc., is located here in town. Tell them you've had
experience. The stinkers who used to run the factory for Indbur are still running it - for the
Mule. They won't ask questions, as long as they need more workers to make their fat hunk.
They'll give you an identity card and you can apply for a room in the Corporation's housing
district. You might start now."
In that manner, Captain Han Pritcher of the National Fleet became Shield-man Lo Moro of the
45 Shop of Nuclear-Field Bearings, Inc. And from an Intelligence agent, he descended the
social scale to "conspirator"- a calling which led him months later to what had been Indbur's
private garden,
In the garden, Captain Pritcher consulted the radometer in the palm of his hand. The inner
warning field was still in operation, and he waited. Half an hour remained to the life of the
nuclear bomb in his mouth. He rolled it gingerly with his tongue.
The radometer died into an ominous darkness and the captain advanced quickly.
So far, matters had progressed well.
He reflected objectively that the life of the nuclear bomb was his as well; that its death was his
death - and the Mule's death.
And the grand climacteric of a four-month's private war would be reached; a war that had
passed from flight through a Newton factory
For two months, Captain Pritcher wore leaden aprons and heavy face shields, till all things
military had been frictioned off his outer bearing. He was a laborer, who collected his pay, spent
his evenings in town, and never discussed politics.
For two months, he did not see the Fox.
And then, one day, a man stumbled past his bench, and there was a scrap of paper in his
pocket. The word "Fox" was on it. Fie tossed it into the nuclear chamber, where it vanished in a
sightless puff, sending the energy output up a millimicrovolt - and turned back to his work.
That night he was at the Fox's home, and took a hand in a game of cards with two other men
he knew by reputation and one by name and face.
Over the cards and the passing and repassing tokens, they spoke.
The captain said, "It's a fundamental error. You live in the exploded past. For eighty years our
organization has been waiting for the correct historical moment. We've been blinded by
Seldon's psychohistory, one of the first propositions of which is that the individual does not
count, does not make history, and that complex social and economic factors override him,
make a puppet out of him." Fie adjusted his cards carefully, appraised their value and said, as
he put out a token. "Why not kill the Mule?"
"Well, now, and what good would that do?" demanded the man at his left, fiercely.
"You see," said the captain, discarding two cards, "that's the attitude. What is one man - out of
quadrillions. The Galaxy won't stop rotating because one man dies. But the Mule is not a man,
he is a mutant. Already, he had upset Seldon's plan, and if you'll stop to analyze the
implications, it means that he - one man - one mutant - upset all of Seldon's psychohistory. If
he had never lived, the Foundation would not have fallen. If he ceased living, it would not
remain fallen.
"Come, the democrats have fought the mayors and the traders for eighty years by connivery.
Let's try assassination."
"Flow?" interposed the Fox, with cold common sense.
The captain said, slowly, "I've spent three months of thought on that with no solution. I came
here and had it in five minutes." Fie glanced briefly at the man whose broad, pink melon of a
face smiled from the place at his right. "You were once Mayor Indbur's chamberlain. I did not
know you were of the underground,"
"Nor I, that you were."
"Well, then, in your capacity as chamberlain you periodically checked the working of the alarm
system of the palace."
"I did."
"And the Mule occupies the palace now."
"So it has been announced - though he is a modest conqueror who makes no speeches,
proclamations nor public appearances of any sort."
"That's an old story, and affects nothing. You, my ex-chamberlain, are all we need."
The cards were shown and the Fox collected the stakes. Slowly, he dealt a new hand.
The man who had once been chamberlain picked up his cards, singly. "Sorry, captain. I
checked the alarm system, but it was routine. I know nothing about it."
"I expected that, but your mind carries an eidetic memory of the controls if it can be probed
deeply enough - with a psychic probe."
The chamberlain's ruddy face paled suddenly and sagged. The cards in his hand crumpled
under sudden fist-pressure, "A psychic probe?"
"You needn't worry," said the captain, sharply. "I know how to use one. It will not harm you past
a few days' weakness. And if it did, it is the chance you take and the price you pay. There are
some among us, no doubt, who from the controls of the alarm could determine the wavelength
combinations. There are some among us who could manufacture a small bomb under
time-control and I myself will carry it to the Mule."
The men gathered over the table.
The captain announced, "On a given evening, a riot will start in Terminus City in the
neighborhood of the palace. No real fighting. Disturbance - then flight. As long as the palace
guard is attracted ... or, at the very least, distracted-"
From that day for a month the preparations went on, and Captain Flan Pritcher of the National
Fleet having become conspirator descended further in the social scale and became an
"assassin."
Captain Pritcher, assassin, was in the palace itself, and found himself grimly pleased with his
psychology. A thorough alarm system outside meant few guards within. In this case, it meant
none at all.
The floor plan was clear in his mind. Fie was a blob moving noiselessly up the well-carpeted
ramp. At its head, he flattened against the wall and waited.
The small closed door of a private room was before him. Behind that door must be the mutant
who had beaten the unbeatable. Fie was early - the bomb had ten minutes of life in it.
Five of these passed, and still in all the world there was no sound. The Mule had five minutes to
live - So had Captain Pritcher-
He stepped forward on sudden impulse. The plot could no longer fail. When the bomb went, the
palace would go with it - all the palace. A door between - ten yards between - was nothing.
But he wanted to see the Mule as they died together.
In a last, insolent gesture, he thundered upon the door.
And it opened and let out the blinding light.
Captain Pritcher staggered, then caught himself. The solemn man, standing in the center of the
small room before a suspended fish bowl, looked up mildly.
FHis uniform was a somber black, and as he tapped the bowl in an absent gesture, it bobbed
quickly and the feather-finned, orange and vermilion fish within darted wildly.
He said, "Come in, captain!"
To the captain's quivering tongue the little metal globe beneath was swelling ominously - a
physical impossibility, the captain knew. But it was in its last minute of life.
The uniformed man said, "You had better spit out the foolish pellet and free yourself for speech.
It won't blast."
The minute passed and with a slow, sodden motion the captain bent his head and dropped the
silvery globe into his palm. With a furious force it was flung against the wall. It rebounded with a
tiny, sharp clangor, gleaming harmlessly as it flew.
The uniformed man shrugged. "So much for that, then. It would have done you no good in any
case, captain. I am not the Mule. You will have to be satisfied with his viceroy."
"How did you know?" muttered the captain, thickly.
"Blame it on an efficient counter-espionage system. I can name every member of your little
gang, every step of their planning-"
"And you let it go this far?"
"Why not? It has been one of my great purposes here to find you and some others. Particularly
you. I might have had you some months ago, while you were still a worker at the Newton
Bearings Works, but this is much better. If you hadn't suggested the main outlines of the plot
yourself, one of my own men would have advanced something of much the same sort for you.
The result is quite dramatic, and rather grimly humorous."
The captain's eyes were hard. "I find it so, too. Is it all over now?"
"Just begun. Come, captain, sit down. Let us leave heroics for the fools who are impressed by
it. Captain, you are a capable man. According to the information I have, you were the first on
the Foundation to recognize the power of the Mule. Since then you have interested yourself,
rather daringly, in the Mule's early life. You have been one of those who carried off his clown,
who, incidentally, has not yet been found, and for which there will yet be full payment. Naturally,
your ability is recognized and the Mule is not of those who fear the ability of his enemies as
long as he can convert it into the ability of a new friend."
"Is that what you're hedging up to? Oh, no!"
"Oh, yes! It was the purpose of tonight's comedy. You are an intelligent man, yet your little
conspiracies against die Mule fail humorously. You can scarcely dignify it with the name of
conspiracy. Is it part of your military training to waste ships in hopeless actions?"
"One must first admit them to be hopeless."
"One will," the viceroy assured him, gently. "The Mule has conquered the Foundation, It is
rapidly being turned into an arsenal for accomplishment of his greater aims."
"What greater aims?"
"The conquest of the entire Galaxy. The reunion of all the tom worlds into a new Empire. The
fulfillment, you dull-witted patriot, of your own Seldon's dream seven hundred years before he
hoped to see it. And in the fulfillment, you can help us."
"I can, undoubtedly. But I won't, undoubtedly."
"I understand," reasoned the viceroy, "that only three of the Independent Trading Worlds yet
resist. They will not last much longer. It will be the last of all Foundation forces. You still hold
out."
"Yes."
"Yet you won't. A voluntary recruit is the, most efficient. But the other kind will do.
Unfortunately, the Mule is absent. He leads the fight, as always, against the resisting Traders.
But he is in continual contact with us. You will not have to wait long."
"For what?"
"For your conversion.
"The Mule," said the captain, frigidly, "will find that beyond his ability."
"But he won't. I was not beyond it. You don't recognize me? Come, you were on Kalgan, so you
have seen me. I wore a monocle, a fur-lined scarlet robe, a high-crowned hat-"
The captain stiffened in dismay. "You were the warlord of Kalgan."
"Yes. And now I am the loyal viceroy of the Mule. You see, he is persuasive."
21. INTERLUDE IN SPACE
The blockade was run successfully. In the vast volume of space, not all the navies ever in
existence could keep their watch in tight proximity. Given a single ship, a skillful pilot, and a
moderate degree of luck, and there are holes and to spare.
With cold-eyed calm, Toran drove a protesting vessel from the vicinity of one star to that of
another. If the neighborhood of great mass made an interstellar jump erratic and difficult, it also
made the enemy detection devices useless or nearly so.
And once the girdle of ships had been passed the inner sphere of dead space, through whose
blockaded sub-ether no message could be driven, was passed as well. For the first time in over
three months Toran felt unisolated.
A week passed before the enemy news programs dealt with anything more than the dull,
self-laudatory details of growing control over the Foundation. It was a week in which Toran's
armored trading ship fled inward from the Periphery in hasty jumps.
Ebling Mis called out to the pilot room and Toran rose blink-eyed from his charts.
"What's the matter?" Toran stepped down into the small central chamber which Bayta had
inevitably devised into a living room.
Mis shook his head, "Bescuppered if I know. The Mule's newsmen are announcing a special
bulletin. Thought you might want to get in on it."
"Might as well. Where's Bayta?"
"Setting the table in the diner and picking out a menuor some such frippery."
Toran sat down upon the cot that served as Magnifico's bed, and waited. The propaganda
routine of the Mule's "special bulletins" were monotonously similar. First the martial music, and
then the buttery slickness of the announcer. The minor news items would come, following one
another in patient lock step. Then the pause. Then the trumpets and the rising excitement and
the climax.
Toran endured it. Mis muttered to himself.
The newscaster spilled out, in conventional war-correspondent phraseology, the unctuous
words that translated into sound the molten metal and blasted flesh of a battle in space.
"Rapid cruiser squadrons under Lieutenant General Sammin hit back hard today at the task
force striking out from Iss-" The carefully expressionless face of the speaker upon the screen
faded into the blackness of a space cut through by the quick swaths of ships reeling across
emptiness in deadly battle. The voice continued through the soundless thunder
"The most striking action of the battle was the subsidiary combat of the heavy cruiser Cluster
against three enemy ships of the 'Nova' class-"
The screen's view veered and closed in. A great ship sparked and one of the frantic attackers
glowed angrily, twisted out of focus, swung back and rammed. The Cluster bowed wildly and
survived the glancing blow that drove the attacker off in twisting reflection.
The newsman's smooth unimpassioned delivery continued to the last blow and the last hulk.
Then a pause, and a large similar voice-and-picture of the fight off Mnemon, to which the
novelty was added of a lengthy description of a hit-and-run landing - the picture of a blasted
city - huddled and weary prisoners - and off again.
Mnemon had not long to live.
The pause again - and this time the raucous sound of the expected brasses. The screen faded
into the long, impressively soldier-lined corridor up which the government spokesman in
councilor's uniform strode quickly.
The silence was oppressive.
The voice that came at last was solemn, slow and hard: "By order of our sovereign, it is
announced that the planet, Haven, hitherto in warlike opposition to his will, has submitted to the
acceptance of defeat. At this moment, the forces of our sovereign are occupying the planet.
Opposition was scattered, unco-ordinated, and speedily crushed."
The scene faded out, the original newsman returned to state importantly that other
developments would be transmitted as they occurred.
Then there was dance music, and Ebling Mis threw the shield that cut the power.
Toran rose and walked unsteadily away, without a word. The psychologist made no move to
stop him.
When Bayta stepped out of the kitchen, Mis motioned silence.
He said, "They've taken Haven."
And Bayta said, "Already?" Her eyes were round, and sick with disbelief.
"Without a fight. Without an unprin-" He stopped and swallowed. "You'd better leave Toran
alone. It's not pleasant for him. Suppose we eat without him this once."
Bayta looked once toward the pilot room, then turned hopelessly. "Very well!"
Magnifico sat unnoticed at the table. He neither spoke nor ate but stared ahead with a
concentrated fear that seemed to drain all the vitality out of his thread of a body.
Ebling Mis pushed absently at his iced-fruit dessert and said, harshly, "Two Trading worlds
fight. They fight, and bleed, and die and don't surrender. Only at Haven - Just as at the
Foundation-"
"But why? Why?"
The psychologist shook his head. "It's of a piece with all the problem. Every queer facet is a
hint at the nature of the Mule. First, the problem of how he could conquer the Foundation, with
little blood, and at a single blow essentially - while the Independent Trading Worlds held out.
The blanket on nuclear reactions was a puny weapon - we've discussed that back and forth till
I'm sick of it - and it did not work on any but the Foundation.
"Randu suggested," and Ebling's grizzly eyebrows pulled together, "it might have been a
radiant Will-Depresser. It's what might have done the work on Haven. But then why wasn't it
used on Mnemon and Iss - which even now fight with such demonic intensity that it is taking
half the Foundation fleet in addition to the Mule's forces to beat them down. Yes, I recognized
Foundation ships in the attack."
Bayta whispered, "The Foundation, then Haven. Disaster seems to follow us, without touching.
We always seem to get out by a hair. Will it last forever?"
Ebling Mis was not listening. To himself, he was making a point. "But there's another problem -
another problem. Bayta, you remember the news item that the Mule's clown was not found on
Terminus; that it was suspected he had fled to Haven, or been carried there by his original
kidnappers. There is an importance attached to him, Bayta, that doesn't fade, and we have not
located it yet. Magnifico must know something that is fatal to the Mule. I'm sure of it. "
Magnifico, white and stuttering, protested, "Sire ... noble lord ... indeed, I swear it is past my
poor reckoning to penetrate your wants. I have told what I know to the utter limits, and with your
probe, you have drawn out of my meager wit that which I knew, but knew not that I knew."
"I know ... I know. It is something small. A hint so small that neither you nor I recognize it for
what it is. Yet I must find it - for Mnemon and Iss will go soon, and when they do, we are the
last remnants, the last droplets of the independent Foundation."
The stars begin to cluster closely when the core of the Galaxy is penetrated. Gravitational fields
begin to overlap at intensities sufficient to introduce perturbations in an interstellar jump that
can not be overlooked.
Toran became aware of that when a jump landed their ship in the full glare of a red giant which
clutched viciously, and whose grip was loosed, then wrenched apart, only after twelve
sleepless, soul-battering hours.
With charts limited in scope, and an experience not at all fully developed, either operationally or
mathematically, Toran resigned himself to days of careful plotting between jumps.
It became a community project of a sort. Ebling Mis checked Toran's mathematics and Bayta
tested possible routes, by the various generalized methods, for the presence of real solutions.
Even Magnifico was put to work on the calculating machine for routine computations, a type of
work, which, once explained, was a source of great amusement to him and at which he was
surprisingly proficient.
So at the end of a month, or nearly, Bayta was able to survey the red line that wormed its way
through the ship's trimensional model of the Galactic Lens halfway to its center, and say with
Satiric relish, "You know what it looks like. It looks like a ten-foot earth-worm with a terrific case
of indigestion. Eventually, you'll land us back in Haven."
"I will," growled Toran, with a fierce rustle of his chart, "if you don't shut up."
"And at that," continued Bayta, "there is probably a route fight through, straight as a meridian of
longitude."
"Yeah? Well, in the first place, dimwit, it probably took five hundred ships five hundred years to
work out that route by hit-and-miss, and my lousy half-credit charts don't give it. Besides,
maybe those straight routes are a good thing to avoid. They're probably choked up with ships.
And besides-"
"Oh, for Galaxy's sake, stop driveling and slavering so much righteous indignation." Her hands
were in his hair.
He yowled, "Ouch! Let go!" seized her wrists and whipped downward, whereupon Toran, Bayta,
and chair formed a tangled threesome on the floor. It degenerated into a panting wrestling
match, composed mostly of choking laughter and various foul blows.
Toran broke loose at Magnifico's breathless entrance.
"What is it?"
The lines of anxiety puckered the clown's face and tightened the skin whitely over the
enormous bridge of his nose. "The instruments are behaving queerly, sir. I have not, in the
knowledge of my ignorance, touched anything-"
In two seconds, Toran was in the pilot room. He said quietly to Magnifico, "Wake up Ebling Mis.
Have him come down here."
He said to Bayta, who was trying to get a basic order back to her hair by use of her fingers,
"We've been detected, Bay."
"Detected?" And Bayta's arms dropped. "By whom?"
"Galaxy knows," muttered Toran, "but I imagine by someone with blasters already ranged and
trained."
He sat down and in a low voice was already sending into the sub-ether the ship's identification
code.
And when Ebling Mis entered, bathrobed and blear-eyed, Toran said with a desperate calm, "It
seems we're inside the borders of a local Inner Kingdom which is called the Autarchy of Filia."
"Never heard of it," said Mis, abruptly.
"Well, neither did I," replied Toran, "but we're being stopped by a Filian ship just the same, and
I don't know what it will involve."
The captain-inspector of the Filian ship crowded aboard with six armed men following him. He
was short, thin-haired, thin-lipped, and dry-skinned. He coughed a sharp cough as he sat down
and threw open the folio under his arm to a blank page.
"Your passports and ship's clearance, please."
"We have none," said Toran.
"None, hey?" he snatched up a microphone suspended from his belt and spoke into it quickly,
"Three men and one woman. Papers not in order." He made an accompanying notation in the
folio.
He said, "Where are you from?"
"Siwenna," said Toran warily.
"Where is that?"
"Thirty thousand parsecs, eighty degrees west Trantor, forty degrees-"
"Never mind, never mind!" Toran could see that his inquisitor had written down: "Point of origin
- Periphery."
The Filian continued, "Where are you going?"
Toran said, "Trantor sector."
"Purpose?"
"Pleasure trip."
"Carrying any cargo?"
"No."
"Hm-m-m. We'll check on that." He nodded and two men jumped to activity. Toran made no
move to interfere.
"What brings you into Filian territory?" The Filian's eyes gleamed unamiably.
"We didn't know we were. I lack a proper chart."
"You will be required to pay a hundred credits for that lack - and, of course, the usual fees
required for tariff duties, et cetera."
He spoke again into the microphone - but listened more than he spoke. Then, to Toran, "Know
anything about nuclear technology?"
"A little," replied Toran, guardedly.
"Yes?" The Filian closed his folio, and added, "The men of the Periphery have a knowledgeable
reputation that way. Put on a suit and come with me."
Bayta stepped forward, "What are you going to do with him?"
Toran put her aside gently, and asked coldly, "Where do you want me to come?"
"Our power plant needs minor adjustments. He'll come with you." His pointing finger aimed
directly at Magnifico, whose brown eyes opened wide in a blubbery dismay.
"What's he got to do with it?" demanded Toran fiercely.
The official looked up coldly. "I am informed of pirate activities in this vicinity. A description of
one of the known thugs tallies roughly. It is a purely routine matter of identification. "
Toran hesitated, but six men and six blasters are eloquent arguments. He reached into the
cupboard for the suits.
An hour later, he rose upright in the bowels of the Filian ship and raged, "There's not a thing
wrong with the motors that I can see. The busbars are true, the L-tubes are feeding properly
and the reaction analysis checks. Who's in charge here?"
The head engineer said quietly, "I am."
"Well, get me out of here-"
He was led to the officers' level and the small anteroom held only an indifferent ensign.
"Where's the man who came with me?"
"Please wait," said the ensign.
It was fifteen minutes later that Magnifico was brought in.
"What did they do to you?" asked Toran quickly.
"Nothing. Nothing at all." Magnifico's head shook a slow negative.
It took two hundred and fifty credits to fulfill the demands of Filia - fifty credits of it for instant
release - and they were in free space again.
Bayta said with a forced laugh, "Don't we rate an escort? Don't we get the usual figurative boot
over the border?"
And Toran replied, grimly, "That was no Filian ship - and we're not leaving for a while. Come in
here."
They gathered about him.
Fie said, whitely, "That was a Foundation ship, and those were the Mule's men aboard."
Ebling bent to pick up the cigar he had dropped. Fie said, "Flere? We're fifteen thousand
parsecs from the Foundation. "
"And we're here. What's to prevent them from making the same trip. Galaxy, Ebling, don't you
think I can tell ships apart? I saw their engines, and that's enough for me. I tell you it was a
Foundation engine in a Foundation ship."
"And how did they get here?" asked Bayta, logically. "What are the chances of a random
meeting of two given ships in space?"
"What's that to do with it?" demanded Toran, hotly. "It would only show we've been followed."
"Followed?" hooted Bayta. "Through hyperspace?"
Ebling Mis interposed wearily, "That can be done - given a good ship and a great pilot. But the
possibility doesn't impress me."
"I haven't been masking my trail," insisted Toran. "I've been building up take-off speed on the
straight. A blind man could have calculated our route."
"The blazes he could," cried Bayta. "With the cockeyed jumps you are making, observing our
initial direction didn't mean a thing. We came out of the jump wrong-end forwards more than
once."
"We're wasting time," blazed Toran, with gritted teeth. "It's a Foundation ship under the Mule.
It's stopped us. It's searched us. It's had Magnifico - alone - with me as hostage to keep the
rest of you quiet, in case you suspected. And we're going to bum it out of space right now."
"Flold on now," and Ebling Mis clutched at him. "Are you going to destroy us for one ship you
think is an enemy? Think, man, would those scuppers chase us over an impossible route half
through the bestinkered Galaxy, look us over, and then let us go?'
"They're still interested in where we're going."
"Then why stop us and put us on our guard? You can't have it both ways, you know."
"I'll have it my way. Let go of me, Ebling, or I'll knock you down."
Magnifico leaned forward from his balanced perch on his favorite chair back. His long nostrils
flared with excitement. "I crave your pardon for my interruption, but my poor mind is of a
sudden plagued with a queer thought."
Bayta anticipated Toran's gesture of annoyance, and added her grip to Ebling's. "Go ahead and
speak, Magnifico. We will all listen faithfully."
Magnifico said, "In my stay in their ship what addled wits I have were bemazed and bemused
by a chattering fear that befell men. Of a truth I have a lack of memory of most that happened.
Many men staring at me, and talk I did not understand. But towards the last - as though a
beam of sunlight had dashed through a cloud rift - there was a face I knew. A glimpse, the
merest glimmer - and yet it glows in my memory ever stronger and brighter."
Toran said, "Who was it?"
"That captain who was with us so long a time ago, when first you saved me from slavery."
It had obviously been Magnifico's intention to create a sensation, and the delighted smile that
curled broadly in the shadow of his proboscis, attested to his realization of the intention's
success.
"Captain ... Han ... Pritcher?" demanded Mis, sternly. "You're sure of that? Certain sure now?"
"Sir, I swear," and he laid a bone-thin hand upon his narrow chest. "I would uphold the truth of it
before the Mule and swear it in his teeth, though all his power were behind him to deny it."
Bayta said in pure wonder, "Then what's it all about?" The clown faced her eagerly, "My lady, I
have a theory. It came upon me, ready made, as though the Galactic Spirit had gently laid it in
my mind." He actually raised his voice above Toran's interrupting objection.
"My lady," he addressed himself exclusively to Bayta, "if this captain had, like us, escaped with
a ship; if he, like us, were on a trip for a purpose of his own devising; if he blundered upon us -
he would suspect us of following and waylaying him, as we suspect him of the like. What
wonder he played this comedy to enter our ship?"
"Why would he want us in his ship, then?" demanded Toran. "That doesn't fit."
"Why, yes, it does," clamored the clown, with a flowing inspiration. "He sent an underling who
knew us not, but who described us into his microphone. The listening captain would be struck
at my own poor likeness - for, of a truth there are not many in this great Galaxy who bear a
resemblance to my scantiness. I was the proof of the identity of the rest of you."
"And so he leaves us?"
"What do we know of his mission, and the secrecy thereof? lie has spied us out for not an
enemy and having it done so, must he needs think it wise to risk his plan by widening the
knowledge thereof?"
Bayta said slowly, "Don't be stubborn, Torie. It does explain things."
"It could be," agreed Mis.
Toran seemed helpless in the face of united resistance. Something in the clown's fluent
explanations bothered him. Something was wrong. Yet he was bewildered and, in spite of
himself, his anger ebbed.
"For a while," he whispered, "I thought we might have had one of the Mule's ships."
And his eyes were dark with the pain of Haven's loss.
The others understood.
22. DEATH ON NEOTRANTOR
NEOTRANTOR The small planet of Dellcass, renamed after the Great Sack, was for nearly a
century, the seat of the last dynasty of the First Empire. It was a shadow world and a shadow
Empire and Its existence Is only of legalistic importance. Under the first of the Neotrantorlan
dynasty....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Neotrantor was the name! New Trantor! And when you have said the name you have
exhausted at a stroke all the resemblances of the new Trantor to the great original. Two
parsecs away, the sun of Old Trantor still shone and the Galaxy's Imperial Capital of the
previous century still cut through space in the silent and eternal repetition of its orbit.
Men even inhabited Old Trantor. Not many - a hundred million, perhaps, where fifty years
before, forty billions had swarmed. The huge, metal world was in jagged splinters. The towering
thrusts of the multi-towers from the single world-girdling base were torn and empty - still
bearing the original blastholes and firegut - shards of the Great Sack of forty years earlier.
It was strange that a world which had been the center of a Galaxy for two thousand years - that
had ruled limitless space and been home to legislators and rulers whose whims spanned the
parsecs - could die in a month. It was strange that a world which had been untouched through
the vast conquering sweeps and retreats of a millennia, and equally untouched by the civil wars
and palace revolutions of other millennia - should lie dead at last. It was strange that the Glory
of the Galaxy should be a rotting corpse.
And pathetic!
For centuries would yet pass before the mighty works of fifty generations of humans would
decay past use. Only the declining powers of men, themselves, rendered them useless now.
The millions left after the billions had died tore up the gleaming metal base of the planet and
exposed soil that had not felt the touch of sun in a thousand years.
Surrounded by the mechanical perfections of human efforts, encircled by the industrial marvels
of mankind freed of the tyranny of environment - they returned to the land. In the huge traffic
clearings, wheat and corn grew. In the shadow of the towers, sheep grazed.
But Neotrantor existed - an obscure village of a planet drowned in the shadow of mighty
Trantor, until a heart-throttled royal family, racing before the fire and flame of the Great Sack
sped to it as its last refuge - and held out there, barely, until the roaring wave of rebellion
subsided. There it ruled in ghostly splendor over a cadaverous remnant of Imperium.
Twenty agricultural worlds were a Galactic Empire!
Dagobert IX, ruler of twenty worlds of refractory squires and sullen peasants, was Emperor of
the Galaxy, Lord of the Universe.
Dagobert IX had been twenty-five on the bloody day he arrived with his father upon Neotrantor.
His eyes and mind were still alive with the glory and the power of the Empire that was. But his
son, who might one day be Dagobert X, was born on Neotrantor.
Twenty worlds were all he knew.
Jord Commason's open air car was the finest vehicle of its type on all Neotrantor - and, after
all, justly so. It did not end with the fact that Commason was the largest landowner on
Neotrantor. It began there. For in earlier days he had been the companion and evil genius of a
young crown prince, restive in the dominating grip of a middle-aged emperor. And now he was
the companion and still the evil genius of a middle-aged crown prince who hated and
dominated an old emperor.
So Jord Commason, in his air car, which in mother-of-pearl finish and gold-and-lumetron
ornamentation needed no coat of arms as owner's identification, surveyed the lands that were
his, and the miles of rolling wheat that were his, and the huge threshers and harvesters that
were his, and the tenant-farmers and machine-tenders that were his - and considered his
problems cautiously.
Beside him, his bent and withered chauffeur guided the ship gently through the upper winds
and smiled.
Jord Commason spoke to the wind, the air, and the sky, "You remember what I told you,
Inchney?"
Inchney's thin gray hair wisped lightly in the wind. His gap-toothed smile widened in its
thin-lipped fashion and the vertical wrinkles of his cheeks deepened as though he were keeping
an eternal secret from himself. The whisper of his voice whistled between his teeth.
"I remember, sire, and I have thought."
"And what have you thought, Inchney?" There was an impatience about the question.
Inchney remembered that he had been young and handsome, and a lord on Old Trantor.
Inchney remembered that he was a disfigured ancient on Neotrantor, who lived by grace of
Squire Jord Commason, and paid for the grace by lending his subtlety on request. He sighed
very softly.
He whispered again, "Visitors from the Foundation, sire, are a convenient thing to have.
Especially, sire, when they come with but a single ship, and but a single fighting man. How
welcome they might be."
"Welcome?" said Commason, gloomily. "Perhaps so. But those men are magicians and may be
powerful."
"Pugh," muttered Inchney, "the mistiness of distance hides the truth. The Foundation is but a
world. Its citizens are but men. If you blast them, they die."
Inchney held the ship on its course - A river was a winding sparkle below. He whispered, "And
is there not a man they speak of now who stirs the worlds of the Periphery?"
Commason was suddenly suspicious. "What do you know of this?"
There was no smile on his chauffeur's face. "Nothing, sire. It was but an idle question."
The squire's hesitation was short. He said, with brutal directness, "Nothing you ask is idle, and
your method of acquiring knowledge will have your scrawny neck in a vise yet. But - I have it!
This man is called the Mule, and a subject of his had been here some months ago on a ...
matter of business. I await another ... now ... for its conclusion."
"And these newcomers? They are not the ones you want, perhaps?"
"They lack the identification they should have."
"It has been reported that the Foundation has been captured-"
"I did not tell you that."
"It has been so reported," continued Inchney, coolly, "and if that is correct, then these may be
refugees from the destruction, and may be held for the Mule's man out of honest friendship."
"Yes?" Commason was uncertain.
"And, sire, since it is well-known that the friend of a conqueror is but the last victim, it would be
but a measure of honest self-defense. For there are such things as psychic probes, and here
we have four Foundation brains. There is much about the Foundation it would be useful to
know, much even about the Mule. And then the Mule's friendship would be a trifle the less
overpowering."
Commason, in the quiet of the upper air, returned with a shiver to his first thought. "But if the
Foundation has not fallen. If the reports are lies. It is said that it has been foretold it can not
fall."
"We are past the age of soothsayers, sire."
"And yet if it did not fall, Inchney. Think! If it did not fall. The Mule made me promises, indeed-"
He had gone too far, and backtracked. "That is, he made boasts. But boasts are wind and
deeds are hard."
Inchney laughed noiselessly. "Deeds are hard indeed, until begun. One could scarcely find a
further fear than a Galaxy-end Foundation."
"There is still the prince," murmured Commason, almost to himself.
"He deals with the Mule also, then, sire?"
Commason could not quite choke down the complacent shift of features. "Not entirely. Not as /
do. But he grows wilder, more uncontrollable. A demon is upon him. If I seize these people and
he takes them away for his own use - for he does not lack a certain shrewdness - I am not yet
ready to quarrel with him." He frowned and his heavy cheeks bent downwards with dislike.
"I saw those strangers for a few moments yesterday," said the gray chauffeur, irrelevantly, "and
it is a strange woman, that dark one. she walks with the freedom of a man and she is of a
startling paleness against the dark luster of hair." There was almost a warmth in the husky
whisper of the withered voice, so that Commason turned toward him in sudden surprise.
Inchney continued, "The prince, I think, would not find his shrewdness proof against a
reasonable compromise. You could have the rest, if you left him the girl-"
A light broke upon Commason, "A thought! Indeed a thought! Inchney, turn back! And Inchney,
if all turns well, we will discuss further this matter of your freedom."
It was with an almost superstitious sense of symbolism that Commason found a Personal
Capsule waiting for him in his private study when he returned. It had arrived by a wavelength
known to few. Commason smiled a fat smile. The Mule's man was coming and the Foundation
had indeed fallen.
Bayta's misty visions, when she had them, of an Imperial palace, did not jibe with the reality,
and inside her, there was a vague sense of disappointment. The room was small, almost plain,
almost ordinary. The palace did not even match the mayor's residence back at the Foundation
- and Dagobert IX -
Bayta had definite ideas of what an emperor ought to look like. He ought not look like
somebody's benevolent grandfather. He ought not be thin and white and faded - or serving
cups of tea with his own hand in an expressed anxiety for the comfort of his visitors.
But so it was.
Dagobert IX chuckled as he poured tea into her stiffly outheld cup.
"This is a great pleasure for me, my dear. It is a moment away from ceremony and courtiers. I
have not had the opportunity for welcoming visitors from my outer provinces for a time now. My
son takes care of these details now that I'm older. You haven't met my son? A fine boy.
Headstrong, perhaps. But then he's young. Do you care for a flavor capsule? No?"
Toran attempted an interruption, "Your imperial majesty-"
"Yes?"
"Your imperial majesty, it has not been our intention to intrude upon you-"
"Nonsense, there is no intrusion. Tonight there will be the official reception, but until then, we
are free. Let's see, where did you say you were from? It seems a long time since we had an
official reception. You said you were from the Province of Anacreon?"
"From the Foundation, your imperial majesty!"
"Yes, the Foundation. I remember now. I had it located. It is in the Province of Anacreon. I have
never been there. My doctor forbids extensive traveling. I don't recall any recent reports from
my viceroy at Anacreon. Flow are conditions there?" he concluded anxiously.
"Sire," mumbled Toran, "I bring no complaints."
"That is gratifying. I will commend my viceroy."
Toran looked helplessly at Ebling Mis, whose brusque voice rose. "Sire, we have been told that
it will require your permission for us to visit the Imperial University Library on Trantor."
"Trantor?" questioned the emperor, mildly, "Trantor?"
Then a look of puzzled pain crossed his thin face. "Trantor?" he whispered. "I remember now. I
am making plans now to return there with a flood of ships at my back. You shall come with me.
Together we will destroy the rebel, Gilmer. Together we shall restore the empire!"
His bent back had straightened. His voice had strengthened. For a moment his eyes were hard.
Then, he blinked and said softly, "But Gilmer is dead. I seem to remember - Yes. Yes! Gilmer
is dead! Trantor is dead - For a moment, it seemed - Where was it you said you came from?"
Magnifico whispered to Bayta, "Is this really an emperor? For somehow I thought emperors
were greater and wiser than ordinary men."
Bayta motioned him quiet. She said, "If your imperial majesty would but sign an order permitting
us to go to Trantor, it would avail greatly the common cause."
"To Trantor?" The emperor was blank and uncomprehending.
"Sire, the Viceroy of Anacreon, in whose name we speak, sends word that Gilmer is yet alive-"
"Alive! Alive!" thundered Dagobert. "Where? It will be war!"
"Your imperial majesty, it must not yet be known. His whereabouts are uncertain. The viceroy
sends us to acquaint you of the fact, and it is only on Trantor that we may find his hiding place.
Once discovered-"
"Yes, yes - Fie must be found-" The old emperor doddered to the wall and touched the little
photocell with a trembling finger. Fie muttered, after an ineffectual pause, "My servants do not
come. I can not wait for them."
Fie was scribbling on a blank sheet, and ended with a flourished "D." Fie said, "Gilmer will yet
learn the power of his emperor. Where was it you came from? Anacreon? What are the
conditions there? Is the name of the emperor powerful?"
Bayta took the paper from his loose fingers, "Your imperial majesty is beloved by the people.
Your love for them is widely known."
"I shall have to visit my good people of Anacreon, but my doctor says ... I don't remember what
he says, but-" He looked up, his old gray eyes sharp, "Were you saying something of Gilmer?"
"No, your imperial majesty."
"He shall not advance further. Go back and tell your people that. Trantor shall hold! My father
leads the fleet now, and the rebel vermin Gilmer shall freeze in space with his regicidal rabble."
He staggered into a seat and his eyes were blank once more. "What was I saying?"
Toran rose and bowed low, "Your imperial majesty has been kind to us, but the time allotted us
for an audience is over. "
For a moment, Dagobert IX looked like an emperor indeed as he rose and stood stiff-backed
while, one by one, his visitors retreated backward through the door
-to where twenty armed men intervened and locked a circle about them.
A hand-weapon flashed-
To Bayta, consciousness returned sluggishly, but without the "Where am I?" sensation. She
remembered clearly the odd old man who called himself emperor, and the other men who
waited outside. The arthritic tingle in her finger joints meant a stun pistol.
She kept her eyes closed, and listened with painful attention to the voices.
There were two of them. One was slow and cautious, with a slyness beneath the surface
obsequity. The other was hoarse and thick, almost sodden, and blurted out in viscous spurts.
Bayta liked neither.
The thick voice was predominant.
Bayta caught the last words, "He will live forever, that old madman. It wearies me. It annoys
me. Commason, I will have it. I grow older, too."
"Your highness, let us first see of what use these people are. It may be we shall have sources
of strength other than your father still provides."
The thick voice was lost in a bubbling whisper. Bayta caught only the phrase, " -the girl-" but
the other, fawning voice was a nasty, low, running chuckle followed by a comradely,
near-patronizing, "Dagobert, you do not age. They lie who say you are not a youth of twenty."
They laughed together, and Bayta's blood was an icy trickle. Dagobert - your highness - The
old emperor had spoken of a headstrong son, and the implication of the whispers now beat
dully upon her. But such things didn't happen to people in real life—
Toran's voice broke upon her in a slow, hard current of cursing.
She opened her eyes, and Toran's, which were upon her, showed open relief. He said, fiercely,
"This banditry will be answered by the emperor. Release us."
It dawned upon Bayta that her wrists and ankles were fastened to wall and floor by a tight
attraction field.
Thick Voice approached Toran. He was paunchy, his lower eyelids puffed darkly, and his hair
was thinning out. There was a gay feather in his peaked hat, and the edging of his doublet was
embroidered with silvery metal-foam.
He sneered with a heavy amusement. "The emperor? The poor, mad emperor?"
"I have his pass. No subject may hinder our freedom."
"But I am no subject, space-garbage. I am the regent and crown prince and am to be
addressed as such. As for my poor silly father, it amuses him to see visitors occasionally. And
we humor him. It tickles his mock-imperial fancy. But, of course, it has no other meaning."
And then he was before Bayta, and she looked up at him contemptuously. He leaned close and
his breath was overpoweringly minted.
He said, "Her eyes suit well, Commason - she is even prettier with them open. I think she'll do.
It will be an exotic dish for a jaded taste, eh?"
There was a futile surge upwards on Toran's part, which the crown prince ignored and Bayta
felt the iciness travel outward to the skin. Ebling Mis was still out; head lolling weakly upon his
chest, but, with a sensation of surprise, Bayta noted that Magnifico's eyes were open, sharply
open, as though awake for many minutes. Those large brown eyes swiveled towards Bayta and
stared at her out of a doughy face.
He whimpered, and nodded with his head towards the crown prince, "That one has my
Visi-Sonor."
The crown prince turned sharply toward the new voice, "This is yours, monster?" He swung the
instrument from his shoulder where it had hung, suspended by its green strap, unnoticed by
Bayta.
He fingered it clumsily, tried to sound a chord and got nothing for his pains, "Can you play it,
monster?"
Magnifico nodded once.
Toran said suddenly, "You've rifled a ship of the Foundation. If the emperor will not avenge, the
Foundation will."
It was the other, Commason, who answered slowly, "What Foundation? Or is the Mule no
longer the Mule?"
There was no answer to that. The prince's grin showed large uneven teeth. The clown's binding
field was broken and he was nudged ungently to his feet. The Visi-Sonor was thrust into his
hand.
"Play for us, monster," said the prince. "Play us a serenade of love and beauty for our foreign
lady here. Tell her that my father's country prison is no palace, but that I can take her to one
where she can swim in rose water - and know what a prince's love is. Sing of a prince's love,
monster.
He placed one thick thigh upon a marble table and swung a leg idly, while his fatuous smiling
stare swept Bayta into a silent rage. Toran's sinews strained against the field, in painful,
perspiring effort. Ebling Mis stirred and moaned.
Magnifico gasped, "My fingers are of useless stiffness-"
"Play, monster!" roared the prince. The lights dimmed at a gesture to Commason and in the
dimness he crossed his arms and waited.
Magnifico drew his fingers in rapid, rhythmic jumps from end to end of the multikeyed
instrument - and a sharp, gliding rainbow of light jumped across the room. A low, soft tone
sounded - throbbing, tearful. It lifted in sad laughter, and underneath it there sounded a dull
tolling.
The darkness seemed to intensify and grow thick. Music reached Bayta through the muffled
folds of invisible blankets. Gleaming light reached her from the depths as though a single
candle glowed at the bottom of a pit.
Automatically, her eyes strained. The light brightened, but remained blurred. It moved fuzzily, in
confused color, and the music was suddenly brassy, evil - flourishing in high crescendo. The
light flickered quickly, in swift motion to the wicked rhythm. Something writhed within the light.
Something with poisonous metallic scales writhed and yawned. And the music writhed and
yawned with it.
Bayta struggled with a strange emotion and then caught herself in a mental gasp. Almost, it
reminded her of the time in the Time Vault, of those last days on Haven. It was that horrible,
cloying, clinging spiderweb of horror and despair. She shrunk beneath it oppressed.
The music dinned upon her, laughing horribly, and the writhing terror at the wrong end of the
telescope in the small circle of light was lost as she turned feverishly away. Her forehead was
wet and cold.
The music died. It must have lasted fifteen minutes, and a vast pleasure at its absence flooded
Bayta. Light glared, and Magnifico's face was close to hers, sweaty, wild-eyed, lugubrious.
"My lady," he gasped, "how fare you?"
"Well enough," she whispered, "but why did you play like that?"
She became aware of the others in the room. Toran and Mis were limp and helpless against
the wall, but her eyes skimmed over them. There was the prince, lying strangely still at the foot
of the table. There was Commason, moaning wildly through an open, drooling mouth.
Commason flinched, and yelled mindlessly, as Magnifico took a step towards him.
Magnifico turned, and with a leap, turned the others loose.
Toran lunged upwards and with eager, taut fists seized the landowner by the neck, "You come
with us. We'll want you - to make sure we get to our ship."
Two hours later, in the ship's kitchen, Bayta served a walloping homemade pie, and Magnifico
celebrated the return to space by attacking it with a magnificent disregard of table manners.
"Good, Magnifico?"
"Um-m-m-m!"
"Magnifico?"
"Yes, my lady?"
"What was it you played back there?"
The clown writhed, "I ... I'd rather not say. I learned it once, and the Visi-Sonor is of an effect
upon the nervous system most profound. Surely, it was an evil thing, and not for your sweet
innocence, my lady."
"Oh, now, come, Magnifico. I'm not as innocent as that. Don't flatter so. Did I see anything like
what f/7eysaw?"
"I hope not. I played it for them only. If you saw, it was but the rim of it - from afar."
"And that was enough. Do you know you knocked the prince out?"
Magnifico spoke grimly through a large, muffling piece of pie. "I killed h\rr\, my lady."
"What?" She swallowed, painfully.
"He was dead when I stopped, or I would have continued. I cared not for Commason. His
greatest threat was death or torture. But, my lady, this prince looked upon you wickedly, and-"
he choked in a mixture of indignation and embarrassment.
Bayta felt strange thoughts come and repressed them sternly. "Magnifico, you've got a gallant
soul."
"Oh, my lady." He bent a red nose into his pie, but, somehow did not eat.
Ebling Mis stared out the port. Trantor was near - its metallic shine fearfully bright. Toran was
standing there, too.
He said with dull bitterness, "We've come for nothing, Ebling. The Mule's man precedes us."
Ebling Mis rubbed his forehead with a hand that seemed shriveled out of its former plumpness.
His voice was an abstracted mutter.
Toran was annoyed. "I say those people know the Foundation has fallen. I say-"
"Eh?" Mis looked up, puzzled. Then, he placed a gentle hand upon Toran's wrist, in complete
oblivion of any previous conversation, "Toran, I ... I've been looking at Trantor. Do you know ... I
have the queerest feeling ... ever since we arrived on Neotrantor. It's an urge, a driving urge
that's pushing and pushing inside. Toran, I can do it; I know I can do it. Things are becoming
clear in my mind - they have never been so clear."
Toran stared - and shrugged. The words brought him no confidence.
He said, tentatively, "Mis?"
"Yes?"
"You didn't see a ship come down on Neotrantor as we left?"
Consideration was brief. "No."
"I did. Imagination, I suppose, but it could have been that Filian ship."
"The one with Captain Han Pritcher on it?"
"The one with space knows who upon it. Magnifico's information - It followed us here, Mis."
Ebling Mis said nothing,
Toran said strenuously, "is there anything wrong with you? Aren't you well?"
Mis's eyes were thoughtful, luminous, and strange. He did not answer.
23. THE RUINS OF TRANTOR
The location of an objective upon the great world of Trantor presents a problem unique in the
Galaxy. There are no continents or oceans to locate from a thousand miles distance. There are
no rivers, lakes, and islands to catch sight of through the cloud rifts.
The metal-covered world was - had been - one colossal city, and only the old Imperial palace
could be identified readily from outer space by a stranger. The Bayta circled the world at almost
air-car height in repeated painful search.
From polar regions, where the icy coating of the metal spires were somber evidence of the
breakdown or neglect of the weather-conditioning machinery, they worked southwards.
Occasionally they could experiment with the correlations -(or presumable correlations)-
between what they saw and what the inadequate map obtained at Neotrantor showed.
But it was unmistakable when it came. The gap in the metal coat of the planet was fifty miles.
The unusual greenery spread over hundreds of square miles, inclosing the mighty grace of the
ancient Imperial residences.
The Bayta hovered and slowly oriented itself. There were only the huge supercauseways to
guide them. Long straight arrows on the map, smooth, gleaming ribbons there below them.
What the map indicated to be the University area was reached by dead reckoning, and upon
the flat area of what once must have been a busy landing-field, the ship lowered itself.
It was only as they submerged into the welter of metal that the smooth beauty apparent from
the air dissolved into the broken, twisted near-wreckage that had been left in the wake of the
Sack. Spires were truncated, smooth walls gouted and twisted, and just for an instant there was
the glimpse of a shaven area of earth - perhaps several hundred acres in extent - dark and
plowed.
Lee Senter waited as the ship settled downward cautiously. It was a strange ship, not from
Neotrantor, and inwardly he sighed. Strange ships and confused dealings with the men of outer
space could mean the end of the short days of peace, a return to the old grandiose times of
death and battle. Senter was leader of the group; the old books were in his charge and he had
read of those old days. He did not want them.
Perhaps ten minutes spent themselves as the strange ship came down to nestle upon the
flatness, but long memories telescoped themselves in that time. There was first the great farm
of his childhood - that remained in his mind merely as busy crowds of people. Then there was
the trek of the young families to new lands. He was ten, then; an only child, puzzled, and
frightened.
Then the new buildings; the great metal slabs to be uprooted and tom aside; the exposed soil
to be turned, and freshened, and invigorated; neighboring buildings to be tom down and
leveled; others to be transformed to living quarters.
There were crops to be grown and harvested; peaceful relations with neighboring farms to be
established-
There was growth and expansion, and the quiet efficiency of self-rule. There was the coming of
a new generation of hard, little youngsters born to the soil. There was the great day when he
was chosen leader of the Group and for the first time since his eighteenth birthday he did not
shave and saw the first stubble of his Leader's Beard appear.
And now the Galaxy might intrude and put an end to the brief idyll of isolation-
The ship landed. He watched wordlessly as the port opened. Four emerged, cautious and
watchful. There were three men, varied, old, young, thin and beaked. And a woman striding
among them like an equal. His hand left the two glassy black tufts of his beard as he stepped
forward.
He gave the universal gesture of peace. Both hands were before him; hard, calloused palms
upward.
The young man approached two steps and duplicated the gesture. "I come in peace."
The accent was strange, but the words were understandable, and welcome. He replied, deeply,
"In peace be it. You are welcome to the hospitality of the Group. Are you hungry? You shall eat.
Are you thirsty? You shall drink."
Slowly, the reply came, "We thank you for your kindness, and shall bear good report of your
Group when we return to our world."
A queer answer, but good. Behind him, the men of the Group were smiling, and from the
recesses of the surrounding structures, the women emerged.
In his own quarters, he removed the locked, mirror-walled box from its hidden place, and
offered each of the guests the long, plump cigars that were reserved for great occasions.
Before the woman, he hesitated. She had taken a seat among the men. The strangers
evidently allowed, even expected, such effrontery. Stiffly, he offered the box.
She accepted one with a smile, and drew in its aromatic smoke, with all the relish one could
expect. Lee Senter repressed a scandalized emotion.
The stiff conversation, in advance of the meal, touched politely upon the subject of fanning on
Trantor.
It was the old man who asked, "What about hydroponics? Surely, for such a world as Trantor,
hydroponics would be the answer."
Senter shook his head slowly. He felt uncertain. His knowledge was the unfamiliar matter of the
books he had read, "Artificial fanning in chemicals, I think? No, not on Trantor. This
hydroponics requires a world of industy - for instance, a great chemical industry. And in war or
disaster, when industry breaks down, the people starve. Nor can all foods be grown artificially.
Some lose their food value. The soil is cheaper, still better - always more dependable."
"And your food supply is sufficient?"
"Sufficient; perhaps monotonous. We have fowl that supply eggs, and milk-yielders for our dairy
products - but our meat supply rests upon our foreign trade."
"Trade." The young man seemed roused to sudden interest. "You trade then. But what do you
export?"
"Metal," was the curt answer. "Look for yourself. We have an infinite supply, ready processed.
They come from Neotrantor with ships, demolish an indicated area-increasing our growing
space - and leave us in exchange meat, canned fruit, food concentrates, farm machinery and
so on. They carry off the metal and both sides profit."
They feasted on bread and cheese, and a vegetable stew that was unreservedly delicious. It
was over the dessert of frosted fruit, the only imported item on the menu, that, for the first time,
the Outlanders became other than mere guests. The young man produced a map of Trantor.
Calmly, Lee Senter studied it. He listened - and said gravely, "The University Grounds are a
static area. We farmers do not grow crops on it. We do not, by preference, even enter it. It is
one of our few relics of another time we would keep undisturbed. "
"We are seekers after knowledge. We would disturb nothing. Our ship would be our hostage."
The old man offered this - eagerly, feverishly.
"I can take you there then," said Senter.
That night the strangers slept, and that night Lee Senter sent a message to Neotrantor.
24. CONVERT
The thin life of Trantor trickled to nothing when they entered among the wide-spaced buildings
of the University grounds. There was a solemn and lonely silence over it.
The strangers of the Foundation knew nothing of the swirling days and nights of the bloody
Sack that had left the University untouched. They knew nothing of the time after the collapse of
the Imperial power, when the students, with their borrowed weapons, and their pale-faced
inexperienced bravery, formed a protective volunteer army to protect the central shrine of the
science of the Galaxy. They knew nothing of the Seven Days Fight, and the armistice that kept
the University free, when even the Imperial palace clanged with the boots of Gilmer and his
soldiers, during the short interval of their rule.
Those of the Foundation, approaching for the first time, realized only that in a world of transition
from a gutted old to a strenuous new this area was a quiet, graceful museum-piece of ancient
greatness.
They were intruders in a sense. The brooding emptiness rejected them. The academic
atmosphere seemed still to live and to stir angrily at the disturbance.
The library was a deceptively small building which broadened out vastly underground into a
mammoth volume of silence and reverie. Ebling Mis paused before the elaborate murals of the
reception room.
Fie whispered - one had to whisper here: "I think we passed the catalog rooms back a way. I'll
stop there."
His forehead was flushed, his hand trembling, "I mustn't be disturbed, Toran. Will you bring my
meals down to me?"
"Anything you say. We'll do all we can to help. Do you want us to work under you-"
"No. I must be alone-"
"You think you will get what you want."
And Ebling Mis replied with a soft certainty, "I know I will!"
Toran and Bayta came closer to "setting up housekeeping" in normal fashion than at any time
in their year of married life. It was a strange sort of "housekeeping." They lived in the middle of
grandeur with an inappropriate simplicity. Their food was drawn largely from Lee Senter's farm
and was paid for in the little nuclear gadgets that may be found on any Trader's ship.
Magnifico taught himself how to use the projectors in the library reading room, and sat over
adventure novels and romances to the point where he was almost as forgetful of meals and
sleep as was Ebling Mis.
Ebling himself was completely buried. Fie had insisted on a hammock being slung up for him in
the Psychology Reference Room. His face grew thin and white. His vigor of speech was lost
and his favorite curses had died a mild death. There were times when the recognition of either
Toran or Bayta seemed a struggle.
He was more himself with Magnifico who brought him his meals and often sat watching him for
hours at a time, with a queer, fascinated absorption, as the aging psychologist transcribed
endless equations, cross-referred to endless book-films, scurried endlessly about in a wild
mental effort towards an end he alone saw.
Toran came upon her in the darkened room, and said sharply, "Bayta!"
Bayta started guiltily. "Yes? You want me, Torie?"
"Sure I want you. What in Space are you sitting there for? You've been acting all wrong since
we got to Trantor. What's the matter with you?"
"Oh, Torie, stop," she said, wearily.
And "Oh, Torie, stop!" he mimicked impatiently. Then, with sudden softness, "Won't you tell me
what's wrong, Bay? Something's bothering you."
"No! Nothing is, Torie. If you keep on just nagging and nagging, you'll have me mad. I'm just —
thinking."
"Thinking about what?"
"About nothing. Well, about the Mule, and Haven, and the Foundation, and everything. About
Ebling Mis and whether he'll find anything about the Second Foundation, and whether it will
help us when he does find it - and a million other things. Are you satisfied?" Her voice was
agitated.
"If you're just brooding, do you mind stopping? It isn't pleasant and it doesn't help the situation."
Bayta got to her feet and smiled weakly. "All right. I'm happy. See, I'm smiling and jolly. "
Magnifico's voice was an agitated cry outside. "My lady-"
"What is it? Come-"
Bayta's voice choked off sharply when the opening door framed the large, hard-faced-
"Pritcher," cried Toran.
Bayta gasped, "Captain! How did you find us?"
Han Pritcher stepped inside. His voice was clear and level, and utterly dead of feeling, "My rank
is colonel now - under the Mule."
"Under the ... Mule!" Toran's voice trailed off. They formed a tableau there, the three.
Magnifico stared wildly and shrank behind Toran. Nobody stopped to notice him.
Bayta said, her hands trembling in each other's tight grasp, "You are arresting us? You have
really gone over to them?"
The colonel replied quickly, "I have not come to arrest you. My instructions make no mention of
you. With regard to you, I am free, and I choose to exercise our old friendship, if you will let
me."
Toran's face was a twisted suppression of fury, "How did you find us? You were in the Filian
ship, then? You followed us?"
The wooden lack of expression on Pritcher's face might have flickered in embarrassment. "I
was on the Filian ship! I met you in the first place ... well ... by chance."
"It is a chance that is mathematically impossible."
"No. Simply rather improbable, so my statement will have to stand. In any case, you admitted to
the. Filians - there is, of course, no such nation as Filia actually - that you were heading for the
Trantor sector, and since the Mule already had his contacts upon Neotrantor, it was easy to
have you detained there. Unfortunately, you got away before I arrived, but not long before. I
had time to have the farms on Trantor ordered to report your arrival. It was done and I am here.
May I sit down? I come in friendliness, believe me.
He sat. Toran bent his head and thought futilely. With a numbed lack of emotion, Bayta
prepared tea.
Toran looked up harshly. "Well, what are you waiting for - colonel? What's your friendship? If
it's not arrest, what is it then? Protective custody? Call in your men and give your orders."
Patiently, Pritcher shook his head. "No, Toran. I come of my own will to speak to you, to
persuade you of the uselessness of what you are doing. If I fail I shall leave. That is all."
"That is all? Well, then peddle your propaganda, give us your speech, and leave. I don't want
any tea, Bayta."
Pritcher accepted a cup, with a grave word of thanks. He looked at Toran with a clear strength
as he sipped lightly. Then he said, "The Mule is a mutant. He can not be beaten in the very
nature of the mutation-"
"Why? What is the mutation?" asked Toran, with sour humor. "I suppose you'll tell us now, eh?"
"Yes, I will. Your knowledge won't hurt him. You see - he is capable of adjusting the emotional
balance of human beings. It sounds like a little trick, but it's quite unbeatable."
Bayta broke in, "The emotional balance?" She frowned, "Won't you explain that? I don't quite
understand."
"I mean that it is an easy matter for him to instill into a capable general, say, the emotion of
utter loyalty to the Mule and complete belief in the Mule's victory. His generals are emotionally
controlled. They can not betray him; they can not weaken - and the control is permanent. His
most capable enemies become his most faithful subordinates, The warlord of Kalgan
surrenders his planet and becomes his viceroy for the Foundation."
"And you," added Bayta, bitterly, "betray your cause and become Mule's envoy to Trantor. I
see!"
"I haven't finished. The Mule's gift works in reverse even more effectively. Despair is an
emotion! At the crucial moment, keymen on the Foundation - keymen on Haven - despaired.
Their worlds fell without too much struggle."
"Do you mean to say," demanded Bayta, tensely, "that the feeling I had in the Time Vault was
the Mule juggling my emotional control."
"Mine, too. Everyone's. How was it on Haven towards the end?"
Bayta turned away.
Colonel Pritcher continued earnestly, "As it works for worlds, so it works for individuals. Can
you fight a force which can make you surrender willingly when it so desires; can make you a
faithful servant when it so desires?"
Toran said slowly, "How do I know this is the truth?"
"Can you explain the fall of the Foundation and of Haven otherwise? Can you explain my
conversion otherwise? Think, man! What have you - or I - or the whole Galaxy accomplished
against the Mule in all this time? What one little thing?"
Toran felt the challenge, "By the Galaxy, I can!" With a sudden touch of fierce satisfaction, he
shouted, "Your wonderful Mule had contacts with Neotrantor you say that were to have
detained us, eh? Those contacts are dead or worse. We killed the crown prince and left the
other a whimpering idiot. The Mule did not stop us there, and that much has been undone."
"Why, no, not at all. Those weren't our men. The crown prince was a wine-soaked mediocrity.
The other man, Commason, is phenomenally stupid. He was a power on his world but that
didn't prevent him from being vicious, evil, and completely incompetent. We had nothing really
to do with them. They were, in a sense, merely feints-"
"It was they who detained us, or tried."
"Again, no. Commason had a personal slave - a man called Inchney. Detention was his policy.
He is old, but will serve our temporary purpose. You would not have killed him, you see."
Bayta whirled on him. She had not touched her own tea. "But, by your very statement, your own
emotions have been tampered with. You've got faith and belief in the Mule, an unnatural, a
diseased faith in the Mule. Of what value are your opinions? You've lost all power of objective
thought."
"You are wrong." Slowly, the colonel shook his head. "Only my emotions are fixed. My reason
is as it always was. It may be influenced in a certain direction by my conditioned emotions, but
it is not forced. And there are some things I can see more clearly now that I am freed of my
earlier emotional trend.
"I can see that the Mule's program is an intelligent and worthy one. In the time since I have
been - converted, I have followed his career from its start seven years ago. With his mutant
mental power, he began by winning over a condottiere and his band. With that - and his power
- he won a planet. With that - and his power - he extended his grip until he could tackle the
warlord of Kalgan. Each step followed the other logically. With Kalgan in his pocket, he had a
first-class fleet, and with that - and his power - he could attack the Foundation.
"The Foundation is the key. It is the greatest area of industrial concentration in the Galaxy, and
now that the nuclear techniques of the Foundation are in his hands, he is the actual master of
the Galaxy. With those techniques - and his power - he can force the remnants of the Empire
to acknowledge his rule, and eventually - with the death of the old emperor, who is mad and
not long for this world - to crown him emperor. Fie will then have the name as well as the fact.
With that - and his power - where is the world in the Galaxy that can oppose him?
"In these last seven years, he has established a new Empire. In seven years, in other words, he
will have accomplished what all Seldon's psychohistory could not have done in less than an
additional seven hundred. The Galaxy will have peace and order at last.
"And you could not stop it - any more than you could stop a planet's rush with your shoulders."
A long silence followed Pritcher's speech. What remained of his tea had grown cold. Fie
emptied his cup, filled it again, and drained it slowly. Toran bit viciously at a thumbnail. Bayta's
face was cold, and distant, and white.
Then Bayta said in a thin voice, "We are not convinced. If the Mule wishes us to be, let him
come here and condition us himself. You fought him until the last moment of your conversion, I
imagine, didn't you?"
"I did," said Colonel Pritcher, solemnly.
"Then allow us the same privilege."
Colonel Pritcher arose. With a crisp air of finality, he said, "Then I leave. As I said earlier, my
mission at present concerns you in no way. Therefore, I don't think it will be necessary to report
your presence here. That is not too great a kindness. If the Mule wishes you stopped, he no
doubt has other men assigned to the job, and you will be stopped. But, for what it is worth, I
shall not contribute more than my requirement."
"Thank you," said Bayta faintly.
"As for Magnifico. Where is he? Come out, Magnifico, I won't hurt you-"
"What about him?" demanded Bayta, with sudden animation.
"Nothing. My instructions make no mention of him, either. I have heard that he is searched for,
but the Mule will find him when the time suits him. I shall say nothing. Will you shake hands?"
Bayta shook her head. Toran glared his frustrated contempt.
There was the slightest lowering of the colonel's iron shoulders. Fie strode to the door, turned
and said:
"One last thing. Don't think I am not aware of the source of your stubbornness. It is known that
you search for the Second Foundation. The Mule, in his time, will take his measures. Nothing
will help you - But I knew you in other times; perhaps there is something in my conscience that
urged me to this; at any rate, I tried to help you and remove you from the final danger before it
was too late. Good-by."
He saluted sharply - and was gone.
Bayta turned to a silent Toran, and whispered, "They even know about the Second
Foundation."
In the recesses of the library, Ebling Mis, unaware of all, crouched under the one spark of light
amid the murky spaces and mumbled triumphantly to himself.
25. DEATH OF A PSYCHOLOGIST
After that there were only two weeks left to the life of Ebling Mis.
And in those two weeks, Bayta was with him three times. The first time was on the night after
the evening upon which they saw Colonel Pritcher. The second was one week later. And the
third was again a week later - on the last day - the day Mis died.
First, there was the night of Colonel Pritcher's evening, the first hour of which was spent by a
stricken pair in a brooding, unmerry merry-go-round.
Bayta said, "Torie, let's tell Ebling."
Toran said dully, "Think he can help?"
"We're only two. We've got to take some of the weight off. Maybe he can help."
Toran said, "He's changed. He's lost weight. He's a little feathery; a little woolly." His fingers
groped in air, metaphorically. "Sometimes, I don't think he'll help us muchever. Sometimes, I
don't think anything will help."
"Don't!" Bayta's voice caught and escaped a break, "Torie, don't! When you say that, I think the
Mule's getting us. Let's tell Ebling, Torie - now!"
Ebling Mis raised his head from the long desk, and bleared at them as they approached. His
thinning hair was scuffed up, his lips made sleepy, smacking sounds.
"Eh?" he said. "Someone want me?"
Bayta bent to her knees, "Did we wake you? Shall we leave?"
"Leave? Who is it? Bayta? No, no, stay! Aren't there chairs? I saw them-" His finger pointed
vaguely.
Toran pushed two ahead of him. Bayta sat down and took one of the psychologist's flaccid
hands in hers. "May we talk to you, Doctor?" She rarely used the title.
"Is something wrong?" A little sparkle returned to his abstracted eyes. His sagging cheeks
regained a touch of color. "Is something wrong?"
Bayta said, "Captain Pritcher has been here. Let me talk, Torie. You remember Captain
Pritcher, Doctor?"
"Yes- Yes-" His fingers pinched his lips and released them. "Tall man. Democrat."
"Yes, he. He's discovered the Mule's mutation. He was here, Doctor, and told us."
"But that is nothing new. The Mule's mutation is straightened out." In honest astonishment,
"Haven't I told you? Have I forgotten to tell you?"
"Forgotten to tell us what?" put in Toran, quickly.
"About the Mule's mutation, of course. He tampers with emotions. Emotional control! I haven't
told you? Now what made me forget?" Slowly, he sucked in his under lip and considered.
Then, slowly, life crept into his voice and his eyelids lifted wide, as though his sluggish brain
had slid onto a well-greased single track. He spoke in a dream, looking between the two
listeners rather than at them. "It is really so simple. It requires no specialized knowledge. In the
mathematics of psychohistory, of course, it works out promptly, in a third-level equation
involving no more - Never mind that. It can be put into ordinary words - roughly - and have it
make sense, which isn't usual with psychohistorical phenomena.
"Ask yourselves - What can upset Hari Seldon's careful scheme of history, eh?" He peered
from one to the other with a mild, questioning anxiety. "What were Seldon's original
assumptions? First, that there would be no fundamental change in human society over the next
thousand years.
"For instance, suppose there were a major change in the Galaxy's technology, such as finding
a new principle for the utilization of energy, or perfecting the study of electronic neurobiology.
Social changes would render Seldon's original equations obsolete. But that hasn't happened,
has it now?"
"Or suppose that a new weapon were to be invented by forces outside the Foundation, capable
of withstanding all the Foundation's armaments. That might cause a ruinous deviation, though
less certainly. But even that hasn't happened. The Mule's Nuclear Field-Depressor was a
clumsy weapon and could be countered. And that was the only novelty he presented, poor as it
was.
"But there was a second assumption, a more subtle one! Seldon assumed that human reaction
to stimuli would remain constant. Granted that the first assumption held true, then the second
must have broken down! Some factor must be twisting and distorting the emotional responses
of human beings or Seldon couldn't have failed and the Foundation couldn't have fallen. And
what factor but the Mule?
"Am I right? Is there a flaw in the reasoning?"
Bayta's plump hand patted his gently. "No flaw, Ebling."
Mis was joyful, like a child. "This and more comes so easily. I tell you I wonder sometimes what
is going on inside me. I seem to recall the time when so much was a mystery to me and now
things are so clear. Problems are absent. I come across what might be one, and somehow,
inside me, I see and understand. And my guesses, my theories seem always to be borne out.
There's a drive in me ... always onward ... so that I can't stop ... and I don't want to eat or sleep
... but always go on ... and on ... and on-"
His voice was a whisper; his wasted, blue-veined hand rested tremblingly upon his forehead.
There was a frenzy in his eyes that faded and went out.
He said more quietly, "Then I never told you about the Mule's mutant powers, did I? But then ...
did you say you knew about it?"
"It was Captain Pritcher, Ebling," said Bayta. "Remember?"
"He told you?" There was a tinge of outrage in his tone. "But how did he find out?"
"He's been conditioned by the Mule. He's a colonel now, a Mule's man. He came to advise us
to surrender to the Mule, and he told us - what you told us."
"Then the Mule knows we're here? I must hurry - Where's Magnifico? Isn't he with you?"
"Magnifico's sleeping," said Toran, impatiently. "It's past midnight, you know."
"It is? Then - Was I sleeping when you came in?"
"You were," said Bayta decisively, "and you're not going back to work, either. You're getting into
bed. Come on, Torie, help me. And you stop pushing at me, Ebling, because it's just your luck I
don't shove you under a shower first. Pull off his shoes, Torie, and tomorrow you come down
here and drag him out into the open air before he fades completely away. Look at you, Ebling,
you'll be growing cobwebs. Are you hungry?"
Ebling Mis shook his head and looked up from his cot in a peevish confusion. "I want you to
send Magnifico down tomorrow," he muttered.
Bayta tucked the sheet around his neck. "You'll have me down tomorrow, with washed clothes.
You're going to take a good bath, and then get out and visit the farm and feel a little sun on
you."
"I won't do it," said Mis weakly. "You hear me? I'm too busy."
His sparse hair spread out on the pillow like a silver fringe about his head. His voice was a
confidential whisper. "You want that Second Foundation, don't you?"
Toran turned quickly and squatted down on the cot beside him. "What about the Second
Foundation, Ebling?"
The psychologist freed an arm from beneath the sheet and his tired fingers clutched at Toran's
sleeve. "The Foundations were established at a great Psychological Convention presided over
by Hari Seldon. Toran, I have located the published minutes of that Convention. Twenty-five fat
films. I have already looked through various summaries."
Well?
"Well, do you know that it is very easy to find from them the exact location of the First
Foundation, if you know anything at all about psychohistory. It is frequently referred to, when
you understand the equations. But Toran, nobody mentions the Second Foundation, There has
been no reference to it anywhere."
Toran's eyebrows pulled into a frown. "It doesn't exist?"
"Of course it exists," cried Mis, angrily, "who said it didn't? But there's less talk of it. Its
significance - and all about it - are better hidden, better obscured. Don't you see? It's the more
important of the two. It's the critical one; the one that counts! And I've got the minutes of the
Seldon Convention. The Mule hasn't won yet-"
Quietly, Bayta turned the lights down. "Go to sleep!"
Without speaking, Toran and Bayta made their way up to their own quarters.
The next day, Ebling Mis bathed and dressed himself, saw the sun of Trantor and felt the wind
of Trantor for the last time. At the end of the day he was once again submerged in the gigantic
recesses of the library, and never emerged thereafter.
In the week that followed, life settled again into its groove. The sun of Neotrantor was a calm,
bright star in Trantor's night sky. The farm was busy with its spring planting. The University
grounds were silent in their desertion. The Galaxy seemed empty. The Mule might never have
existed.
Bayta was thinking that as she watched Toran light his cigar carefully and look up at the
sections of blue sky visible between the swarming metal spires that encircled the horizon.
"It's a nice day," he said.
"Yes, it is. Flave you everything mentioned on the list, Torie?"
"Sure. Half pound butter, dozen eggs, string beans - Got it all down here, Bay. I'll have it right."
"Good. And make sure the vegetables are of the last harvest and not museum relics. Did you
see Magnifico anywhere, by the way?"
"Not since breakfast. Guess he's down with Ebling, watching a book-film."
"All right. Don't waste any time, because I'll need the eggs for dinner."
Toran left with a backward smile and a wave of the hand.
Bayta turned away as Toran slid out of sight among the maze of metal. She hesitated before
the kitchen door, about-faced slowly, and entered the colonnade leading to the elevator that
burrowed down into the recesses.
Ebling Mis was there, head bent down over the eyepieces of the projector, motionless, a
frozen, questing body. Near him sat Magnifico, screwed up into a chair, eyes sharp and
watching - a bundle of slatty limbs with a nose emphasizing his scrawny face.
Bayta said softly, "Magnifico-"
Magnifico scrambled to his feet. His voice was an eager whisper. "My lady!"
"Magnifico," said Bayta, "Toran has left for the farm and won't be back for a while. Would you
be a good boy and go out after him with a message that I'll write for you?"
"Gladly, my lady. My small services are but too eagerly yours, for the tiny uses you can put
them to."
She was alone with Ebling Mis, who had not moved. Firmly, she placed her hand upon his
shoulder. "Ebling-"
The psychologist started, with a peevish cry, "What is it?" He wrinkled his eyes. "Is it you,
Bayta? Where's Magnifico?"
"I sent him away. I want to be alone with you for a while." She enunciated her words with
exaggerated distinctness. "I want to talk to you, Ebling."
The psychologist made a move to return to his projector, but her hand on his shoulder was firm.
She felt the bone under the sleeve clearly. The flesh seemed to have fairly melted away since
their arrival on Trantor. His face was thin, yellowish, and bore a half-week stubble. His
shoulders were visibly stooped, even in a sitting position.
Bayta said, "Magnifico isn't bothering you, is he, Ebling? He seems to be down here night and
day."
"No, no, no! Not at all. Why, I don't mind him. He is silent and never disturbs me. Sometimes he
carries the films back and forth for me; seems to know what I want without my speaking. Just
let him be."
"Very well - but, Ebling, doesn't he make you wonder? Do you hear me, Ebling? Doesn't he
make you wonder?"
She jerked a chair close to his and stared at him as though to pull the answer out of his eyes.
Ebling Mis shook his head. "No. What do you mean?"
"I mean that Colonel Pritcher and you both say the Mule can condition the emotions of human
beings. But are you sure of it? Isn't Magnifico himself a flaw in the theory?"
There was silence.
Bayta repressed a strong desire to shake the psychologist. "What's wrong with you, Ebling?
Magnifico was the Mule's clown. Why wasn't he conditioned to love and faith? Why should he,
of all those in contact with the Mule, hate him so.
"But ... but he was conditioned. Certainly, Bay!" He seemed to gather certainty as he spoke.
"Do you suppose that the Mule treats his clown the way he treats his generals? He needs faith
and loyalty in the latter, but in his clown he needs only fear. Didn't you ever notice that
Magnifico's continual state of panic is pathological in nature? Do you suppose it is natural for a
human being to be as frightened as that all the time? Fear to such an extent becomes comic. It
was probably comic to the Mule - and helpful, too, since it obscured what help we might have
gotten earlier from Magnifico."
Bayta said, "You mean Magnifico's information about the Mule was false?"
"it was misleading. It was colored by pathological fear. The Mule is not the physical giant
Magnifico thinks. He is more probably an ordinary man outside his mental powers. But if it
amused him to appear a superman to poor Magnifico-" The psychologist shrugged. "In any
case, Magnifico's information is no longer of importance."
"What is, then?"
But Mis shook himself loose and returned to his projector.
"What is, then?" she repeated. "The Second Foundation?"
The psychologist's eyes jerked towards her. "Have I told you anything about that? I don't
remember telling you anything. I'm not ready yet. What have I told you?"
"Nothing," said Bayta, intensely. "Oh, Galaxy, you've told me nothing, but I wish you would
because I'm deathly tired. When will it be over?"
Ebling Mis peered at her, vaguely rueful, "Well, now, my ... my dear, I did not mean to hurt you.
I forget sometimes ... who my friends are. Sometimes it seems to me that I must not talk of all
this. There's a need for secrecy - but from the Mule, not from you, my dear." He patted her
shoulder with a weak amiability.
She said, "What about the Second Foundation?"
His voice was automatically a whisper, thin and sibilant. "Do you know the thoroughness with
which Seldon covered his traces? The proceedings of the Seldon Convention would have been
of no use to me at a as little as a month ago, before this strange insight came. Even now, it
seems - tenuous. The papers put out by the Convention are often apparently unrelated; always
obscure. More than once I wondered if the members of the Convention, themselves, knew all
that was in Seldon's mind. Sometimes I think he used the Convention only as a gigantic front,
and single-handed erected the structure-"
"Of the Foundations?" urged Bayta.
"Of the Second Foundation! Our Foundation was simple. But the Second Foundation was only
a name. It was mentioned, but if there was any elaboration, it was hidden deep in the
mathematics. There is still much I don't even begin to understand, but for seven days, the bits
have been clumping together into a vague picture.
"Foundation Number One was a world of physical scientists. It represented a concentration of
the dying science of the Galaxy under the conditions necessary to make it live again. No
psychologists were included. It was a peculiar distortion, and must have had a purpose. The
usual explanation was that Seldon's psychohistory worked best where the individual working
units - human beings - had no knowledge of what was coming, and could therefore react
naturally to all situations. Do you follow me, my dear-"
Yes, doctor.
"Then listen carefully. Foundation Number Two was a world of mental scientists. It was the
mirror image of our world. Psychology, not physics, was king." Triumphantly. "You see?"
"I don't."
"But think, Bayta, use your head. Hari Seldon knew that his psychohistory could predict only
probabilities, and not certainties. There was always a margin of error, and as time passed that
margin increases in geometric progression. Seldon would naturally guard as well as he could
against it. Our Foundation was scientifically vigorous. It could conquer armies and weapons. It
could pit force against force. But what of the mental attack of a mutant such as the Mule?"
"That would be for the psychologists of the Second Foundation!" Bayta felt excitement rising
within her.
"Yes, yes, yes! Certainly!"
"But they have done nothing so far."
"Flow do you know they haven't?"
Bayta considered that, "I don't. Do you have evidence that they have?"
"No. There are many factors I know nothing of. The Second Foundation could not have been
established full-grown, any more than we were. We developed slowly and grew in strength;
they must have also. The stars know at what stage their strength is now. Are they strong
enough to fight the Mule? Are they aware of the danger in the first place? Flave they capable
leaders?"
"But if they follow Seldon's plan, then the Mule must be beaten by the Second Foundation."
"Ah," and Ebling Mis's thin face wrinkled thoughtfully, "is it that again? But the Second
Foundation was a more difficult job than the First. Its complexity is hugely greater; and
consequently so is its possibility of error. And if the Second Foundation should not beat the
Mule, it is bad - ultimately bad. It is the end, may be, of the human race as we know it."
"No.
"Yes. If the Mule's descendants inherit his mental powers - You see? Flomo sapiens could not
compete. There would be a new dominant race - a new aristocracy - with homo sapiens
demoted to slave labor as an inferior race. Isn't that so?"
"Yes, that is so."
"And even if by some chance the Mule did not establish a dynasty, he would still establish a
distorted new Empire upheld by his personal power only. It would die with his death; the Galaxy
would be left where it was before he came, except that there would no longer be Foundations
around which a real and healthy Second Empire could coalesce. It would mean thousands of
years of barbarism. It would mean no end in sight."
What can we do? Can we warn the Second Foundation?
"We must, or they may go under through ignorance, which we can not risk. But there is no way
of warning them."
"No way?"
"I don't know where they are located. They are 'at the other end of the Galaxy' but that is all,
and there are millions of worlds to choose from."
"But, Ebling, don't they say?" She pointed vaguely at the films that covered the table.
"No, they don't. Not where I can find it - yet. The secrecy must mean something. There must
be a reason-" A puzzled expression returned to his eyes. "But I wish you'd leave. I have
wasted enough time, and it's growing short - it's growing short."
He tore away, petulant and frowning.
Magnifico's soft step approached. "Your husband is home, my lady."
Ebling Mis did not greet the clown. He was back at his projector.
That evening Toran, having listened, spoke, "And you think he's really right, Bay? You think he
isn't-" He hesitated.
"He is right, Torie. He's sick, I know that. The change that's come over him, the loss in weight,
the way he speaks - he's sick. But as soon as the subject of the Mule or the Second
Foundation, or anything he is working on, comes up, listen to him. He is lucid and clear as the
sky of outer space. He knows what he's talking about. I believe him."
"Then there's hope." It was half a question.
"I ... I haven't worked it out. Maybe! Maybe not! I'm carrying a blaster from now on." The
shiny-barreled weapon was in her hand as she spoke. "Just in case, Torie, just in case."
"In case what?"
Bayta laughed with a touch of hysteria, "Never mind. Maybe I'm a little crazy, too - like Ebling
Mis."
Ebling Mis at that time had seven days to live, and the seven days slipped by, one after the
other, quietly.
To Toran, there was a quality of stupor about them. The warming days and the dull silence
covered him with lethargy. All life seemed to have lost its quality of action, and changed into an
infinite sea of hibernation.
Mis was a hidden entity whose burrowing work produced nothing and did not make itself
known. He had barricaded himself. Neither Toran nor Bayta could see him. Only Magnifico's
go-between characteristics were evidence of his existence. Magnifico, grown silent and
thoughtful, with his tiptoed trays of food and his still, watchful witness in the gloom.
Bayta was more and more a creature of herself. The vivacity died, the self-assured competence
wavered. She, too, sought her own worried, absorbed company, and once Toran bad come
upon her, fingering her blaster. She had put it away quickly, forced a smile.
"What are you doing with it, Bay?"
"Holding it. Is that a crime?"
"You'll blow your fool head off."
"Then I'll blow it off. Small loss!"
Married life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood. He
shrugged, and left her.
On the last day, Magnifico scampered breathless into their presence. He clutched at them,
frightened. "The learned doctor calls for you. He is not well."
And he wasn't well. He was in bed, his eyes unnaturally large, unnaturally bright. He was dirty,
unrecognizable.
"Ebling!" cried Bayta.
"Let me speak," croaked the psychologist, lifting his weight to a thin elbow with an effort. "Let
me speak. I am finished; the work I pass on to you. I have kept no notes; the scrap-figures I
have destroyed. No other must know. All must remain in your minds."
"Magnifico," said Bayta, with rough directness. "Go upstairs!"
Reluctantly, the clown rose and took a backward step. His sad eyes were on Mis.
Mis gestured weakly, "He won't matter; let him stay. Stay, Magnifico."
The clown sat down quickly. Bayta gazed at the floor.
Slowly, slowly, her lower lip caught in her teeth.
Mis said, in a hoarse whisper, "I am convinced the Second Foundation can win, if it is not
caught prematurely by the Mule. It has kept itself secret; the secrecy must be upheld; it has a
purpose. You must go there; your information is vital ... may make all the difference. Do you
hear me?"
Toran cried in near-agony, "Yes, yes! Tell us how to get there, Ebling? Where is it?"
"I can tell you," said the faint voice.
He never did.
Bayta, face frozen white, lifted her blaster and shot, with an echoing clap of noise. From the
waist upward, Mis was not, and a ragged hole was in the wall behind. From numb fingers,
Bayta's blaster dropped to the floor.
26. END OF THE SEARCH
There was not a word to be said. The echoes of the blast rolled away into the outer rooms and
rumbled downward into a hoarse, dying whisper. Before its death, it had muffled the sharp
clamor of Bayta's falling blaster, smothered Magnifico's high-pitched cry, drowned out Toran's
inarticulate roar.
There was a silence of agony.
Bayta's head was bent into obscurity. A droplet caught the light as it fell. Bayta had never wept
since her childhood.
Toran's muscles almost cracked in their spasm, but he did not relax - he felt as if he would
never unclench his teeth again. Magnifico's face was a faded, lifeless mask.
Finally, from between teeth still tight, Toran choked out in an unrecognizable voice, "You're a
Mule's woman, then. He got to you!"
Bayta looked up, and her mouth twisted with a painful merriment, "/, a Mule's woman? That's
ironic."
She smiled - a brittle effort - and tossed her hair back. Slowly, her voice verged back to the
normal, or something near it. "It's over, Toran; I can talk now. How much I will survive, I don't
know. But I can start talking-"
Toran's tension had broken of its own weight and faded into a flaccid dullness, "Talk about
what, Bay? What's there to talk about?"
"About the calamity that's followed us. We've remarked about it before, Torie. Don't you
remember? How defeat has always bitten at our heels and never actually managed to nip us?
We were on the Foundation, and it collapsed while the Independent Traders still fought - but
we got out in time to go to Haven. We were on Haven, and it collapsed while the others still
fought - and again we got out in time. We went to Neotrantor, and by now it's undoubtedly
joined the Mule."
Toran listened and shook his head, "I don't understand."
"Torie, such things don't happen in real life. You and I are insignificant people; we don't fall from
one vortex of politics into another continuously for the space of a year - unless we carry the
vortex with us. Unless we carry the source of infection with us! Now do you see?"
Toran's lips tightened. His glance fixed horribly upon the bloody remnants of what had once
been a human, and his eyes sickened.
"Let's get out of here, Bay. Let's get out into the open."
It was cloudy outside. The wind scudded about them in drab spurts and disordered Bayta's hair.
Magnifico had crept after them and now he hovered at the edge of their conversation.
Toran said tightly, "You killed Ebling Mis because you believed him to be the focus of
infection?" Something in her eyes struck him. He whispered, "He was the Mule?" He did not -
could not - believe the implications of his own words.
Bayta laughed sharply, "Poor Ebling the Mule? Galaxy, no! I couldn't have killed him if he were
the Mule. He would have detected the emotion accompanying the move and changed it for me
to love, devotion, adoration, terror, whatever he pleased. No, I killed Ebling because he was not
the Mule. I killed him because he knew where the Second Foundation was, and in two seconds
would have told the Mule the secret."
"Would have told the Mule the secret," Toran repeated stupidly. "Told the Mule-"
And then he emitted a sharp cry, and turned to stare in horror at the clown, who might have
been crouching unconscious there for the apparent understanding he had of what he heard.
"Not Magnifico?" Toran whispered the question.
"Listen!" said Bayta. "Do you remember what happened on Neotrantor? Oh, think for yourself,
Torie-"
But he shook his head and mumbled at her.
She went on, wearily, "A man died on Neotrantor. A man died with no one touching him. Isn't
that true? Magnifico played on his Visi-Sonor and when he was finished, the crown prince was
dead. Now isn't that strange? Isn't it queer that a creature afraid of everything, apparently
helpless with terror, has the capacity to kill at will."
"The music and the light-effects," said Toran, "have a profound emotional effect-"
"Yes, an emotional effect. A pretty big one. Emotional effects happen to be the Mule's specialty.
That, I suppose, can be considered a coincidence. And a creature who can kill by suggestion is
so full of fright. Well, the Mule tampered with his mind, supposedly, so that can be explained.
But, Toran, I caught a little of that Visi-Sonor selection that killed the crown prince. Just a little -
but it was enough to give me that same feeling of despair I had in the Time Vault and on
Haven. Toran, I can't mistake that particular feeling."
Toran's face was darkening. "I ... felt it, too. I forgot. I never thought-"
"It was then that it first occurred to me. It was just a vague feeling - intuition, if you like. I had
nothing to go on. And then Pritcher told us of the Mule and his mutation, and it was clear in a
moment. It was the Mule who had created the despair in the Time Vault; it was Magnifico who
had created the despair on Neotrantor. It was the same emotion. Therefore, the Mule and
Magnifico were the same person. Doesn't it work out nicely, Torie? Isn't it just like an axiom in
geometry - things equal to the same thing are equal to each other?"
She was at the edge of hysteria, but dragged herself back to sobriety by main force. She
continued, "The discovery scared me to death. If Magnifico were the Mule, he could know my
emotions - and cure them for his own purposes. I dared not let him know. I avoided him.
Luckily, he avoided me also; he was too interested in Ebling Mis. I planned killing Mis before he
could talk. I planned it secretly - as secretly as I could - so secretly I didn't dare tell it to myself.
"If I could have killed the Mule himself - But I couldn't take the chance. He would have noticed,
and I would have lost everything."
She seemed drained of emotion.
Toran said harshly and with finality, "It's impossible. Look at the miserable creature. He the
Mule? He doesn't even hear what we're saying."
But when his eyes followed his pointing finger, Magnifico was erect and alert, his eyes sharp
and darkly bright. His voice was without a trace of an accent, "I hear her, my friend. It is merely
that I have been sitting here and brooding on the fact that with all my cleverness and
forethought I could make a mistake, and lose so much."
Toran stumbled backward as if afraid the clown might touch him or that his breath might
contaminate him.
Magnifico nodded, and answered the unspoken question. "I am the Mule."
He seemed no longer a grotesque; his pipestem limbs, his beak of a nose lost their
humor-compelling qualities. His fear was gone; his bearing was firm.
He was in command of the situation with an ease born of usage.
He said, tolerantly, "Seat yourselves. Go ahead; you might as well sprawl out and make
yourselves comfortable. The game's over, and I'd like to tell you a story. It's a weakness of
mine - I want people to understand me."
And his eyes as he looked at Bayta were still the old, soft sad brown ones of Magnifico, the
clown.
"There is nothing really to my childhood," he began, plunging bodily into quick, impatient
speech, "that I care to remember. Perhaps you can understand that. My meagerness is
glandular; my nose I was born with. It was not possible for me to lead a normal childhood. My
mother died before she saw me. I do not know my father. I grew up haphazard, wounded and
tortured in mind, full of self-pity and hatred of others. I was known then as a queer child. All
avoided me; most out of dislike; some out of fear. Queer incidents occurred - Well, never mind!
Enough happened to enable Captain Pritcher, in his investigation of my childhood to realize
that I was a mutant, which was more than / ever realized until I was in my twenties."
Toran and Bayta listened distantly. The wash of his voice broke over them, seated on the
ground as they were, unheeded almost. The clown - or the Mule - paced before them with little
steps, speaking downward to his own folded arms.
"The whole notion of my unusual power seems to have broken on me so slowly, in such
sluggish steps. Even toward the end, I couldn't believe it. To me, men's minds are dials, with
pointers that indicate the prevailing emotion. It is a poor picture, but how else can I explain it?
Slowly, I learned that I could reach into those minds and turn the pointer to the spot I wished,
that I could nail it there forever. And then it took even longer to realize that others couldn't.
"But the consciousness of power came, and with it, the desire to make up for the miserable
position of my earlier life. Maybe you can understand it. Maybe you can try to understand it. It
isn't easy to be a freak - to have a mind and an understanding and be a freak. Laughter and
cruelty! To be different! To be an outsider!
"You've never been through it!"
Magnifico looked up to the sky and teetered on the balls of his feet and reminisced stonily, "But
I eventually did learn, and I decided that the Galaxy and I could take turns. Come, they had had
their innings, and I had been patient about it - for twenty-two years. My turn! It would be up to
the rest of you to take it! And the odds would be fair enough for the Galaxy. One of me!
Quadrillions of them!"
He paused to glance at Bayta swiftly. "But I had a weakness. I was nothing in myself. If I could
gain power, it could only be by means of others. Success came to me through middlemen.
Always! It was as Pritcher said. Through a pirate, I obtained my first asteroidal base of
operations. Through an industrialist I got my first foothold on a planet. Through a variety of
others ending with the warlord of Kalgan, I won Kalgan itself and got a navy. After that, it was
the Foundation - and you two come into the story.
"The Foundation," he said, softly, "was the most difficult task I had met. To beat it, I would have
to win over, break down, or render useless an extraordinary proportion of its ruling class. I
could have done it from scratch - but a short cut was possible, and I looked for it. After all, if a
strong man can lift five hundred pounds, it does not mean that he is eager to do so
continuously. My emotional control is not an easy task, I prefer not to use it, where not fully
necessary. So I accepted allies in my first attack upon the Foundation.
"As my clown, I looked for the agent, or agents, of the Foundation that must inevitably have
been sent to Kalgan to investigate my humble self. I know now it was Han Pritcher I was
looking for. By a stroke of fortune, I found you instead. I am a telepath, but not a complete one,
and, my lady, you were from the Foundation. I was led astray by that. It was not fatal for
Pritcher joined us afterward, but it was the starting point of an error that was fatal."
Toran stirred for the first time. He spoke in an outraged tone, "Hold on, now. You mean that
when I outfaced that lieutenant on Kalgan with only a stun pistol, and rescued you - that you
had emotionally-controlled me into it." He was spluttering. "You mean I've been tampered with
all along."
A thin smile played on Magnifico's face. "Why not? You don't think it's likely? Ask yourself then
- Would you have risked death for a strange grotesque you had never seen before, if you had
been in your right mind? I imagine you were surprised at events in cold after-blood."
"Yes," said Bayta, distantly, "he was. It's quite plain."
"As it was," continued the Mule, "Toran was in no danger. The lieutenant had his own strict
instructions to let us go. So the three of us and Pritcher went to the Foundation - and see how
my campaign shaped itself instantly. When Pritcher was court-martialed and we were present, I
was busy. The military judges of that trial later commanded their squadrons in the war. They
surrendered rather easily, and my Navy won the battle of Horleggor, and other lesser affairs.
"Through Pritcher, I met Dr. Mis, who brought me a Visi-Sonor, entirely of his own accord, and
simplified my task immensely. Only it wasn't entirely of his own accord."
Bayta interrupted, "Those concerts! I've been trying to fit them in. Now I see."
"Yes," said Magnifico, "the Visi-Sonor acts as a focusing device. In a way, it is a primitive
device for emotional control in itself. With it, I can handle people in quantity and single people
more intensively. The concerts I gave on Terminus before it fell and Haven before it fell
contributed to the general defeatism. I might have made the crown prince of Neotrantor very
sick without the Visi-Sonor, but I could not have killed him. You see?
"But it was Ebling Mis who was my most important find. He might have been-" Magnifico said it
with chagrin, then hurried on, "There is a special facet to emotional control you do not know
about. Intuition or insight or hunch-tendency, whatever you wish to call it, can be treated as an
emotion. At least, I can treat it so. You don't understand it, do you?"
He waited for no negative, "The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the
figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power it is termed a hunch,
or insight, or intuition. I found early that I could induce a continual use of high brain-efficiency. It
is a killing process for the person affected, but it is useful. The nuclear field-depressor which I
used in the war against the Foundation was the result of high-pressuring a Kalgan technician.
Again I work through others.
"Ebling Mis was the bull's-eye. His potentialities were high, and I needed him. Even before my
war with the Foundation had opened, I had already sent delegates to negotiate with the Empire.
It was at that time I began my search for the Second Foundation. Naturally, I didn't find it.
Naturally, I knew that I must find it - and Ebling Mis was the answer. With his mind at high
efficiency, he might possibly have duplicated the work of Hari Seldon.
"Partly, he did. I drove him to the utter limit. The process was ruthless, but had to be completed.
He was dying at the end, but he lived-" Again, his chagrin interrupted him. "He would have
lived long enough. Together, we three could have gone onward to the Second Foundation. It
would have been the last battle - but for my mistake."
Toran stirred his voice to hardness, "Why do you stretch it out so? What was your mistake, and
... and have done with your speech."
"Why, your wife was the mistake. Your wife was an unusual person. I had never met her like
before in my life. I ... I-" Quite suddenly, Magnifico's voice broke. He recovered with difficulty.
There was a grimness about him as he continued. "She liked me without my having to juggle
her emotions. She was neither repelled by me nor amused by me. She liked me!
"Don't you understand? Can't you see what that would mean to me? Never before had anyone
- Well, I ... cherished that. My own emotions played me false, though I was master of all others.
I stayed out of her mind, you see; I did not tamper with it. I cherished the natural feeling too
greatly. It was my mistake - the first.
"You, Toran, were under control. You never suspected me; never questioned me; never saw
anything peculiar or strange about me. As for instance, when the 'Filian' ship stopped us. They
knew our location, by the way, because I was in communication with them, as I've remained in
communication with my generals at all times. When they stopped us, I was taken aboard to
adjust Han Pritcher, who was on it as a prisoner. When I left, he was a colonel, a Mule's man,
and in command. The whole procedure was too open even for you, Toran. Yet you accepted
my explanation of the matter, which was full of fallacies. See what I mean?"
Toran grimaced, and challenged him, "How did you retain communications with your generals?"
"There was no difficulty to it. Hyperwave transmitters are easy to handle and eminently
portable. Nor could I be detected in a real sense! Anyone who did catch me in the act would
leave me with a slice gapped out of his memory. It happened, on occasion.
"On Neotrantor, my own foolish emotions betrayed me again. Bayta was not under my control,
but even so might never have suspected me if I had kept my head about the crown prince. His
intentions towards Bayta - annoyed me.
"I killed him. It was a foolish gesture. An unobtrusive flight would have served as well.
"And still your suspicions would not have been certainties, if I had stopped Pritcher in his
well-intentioned babbling, or paid less attention to Mis and more to you-" He shrugged.
"That's the end of it?" asked Bayta.
"That's the end."
"What now, then?"
"I'll continue with my program. That I'll find another as adequately brained and trained as Ebling
Mis in these degenerate days, I doubt. I shall have to search for the Second Foundation
otherwise. In a sense you have defeated me."
And now Bayta was upon her feet, triumphant. "In a sense? Only in a sense? We have
defeated you entirely! All your victories outside the Foundation count for nothing, since the
Galaxy is a barbarian vacuum now. The Foundation itself is only a minor victory, since it wasn't
meant to stop your variety of crisis. It's the Second Foundation you must beat - the Second
Foundation - and it's the Second Foundation that will defeat you. Your only chance was to
locate it and strike it before it was prepared. You won't do that now. Every minute from now on,
they will be readier for you. At this moment, at this moment, the machinery may have started.
You'll know - when it strikes you, and your short term of power will be over, and you'll be just
another strutting conqueror, flashing quickly and meanly across the bloody face of history."
She was breathing hard, nearly gasping in her vehemence, "And we've defeated you, Toran
and I. I am satisfied to die."
But the Mule's sad, brown eyes were the sad, brown, loving eyes of Magnifico. "I won't kill you
or your husband. It is, after all, impossible for you two to hurt me further; and killing you won't
bring back Ebling Mis. My mistakes were my own, and I take responsibility for them. Your
husband and yourself may leave! Go in peace, for the sake of what I call - friendship."
Then, with a sudden touch of pride, "And meanwhile I am still the Mule, the most powerful man
in the Galaxy. I shall still defeat the Second Foundation."
And Bayta shot her last arrow with a firm, calm certitude, "You won't! I have faith in the wisdom
of Seldon yet. You shall be the last ruler of your dynasty, as well as the first."
Something caught Magnifico. "Of my dynasty? Yes, I had thought of that, often. That I might
establish a dynasty. That I might have a suitable consort."
Bayta suddenly caught the meaning of the look in his eyes and froze horribly.
Magnifico shook his head. "I sense your revulsion, but that's silly. If things were otherwise, I
could make you happy very easily. It would be an artificial ecstasy, but there would be no
difference between it and the genuine emotion. But things are not otherwise. I call myself the
Mule - but not because of my strength - obviously-"
He left them, never looking back.
ASIMOV
SECOND FOUNDATION
SECOND FOUNDATION
ISAAC ASIMOV
Contents
PROLOGUE
PART I SEARCH BY THE MULE
1 . TWO MEN AND THE MULE
First Interlude
2. TWO MEN WITHOUT THE MULE
Second Interlude
3. TWO MEN AND A PEASANT
Third Interlude
4. TWO MEN AND THE ELDERS
Fourth Interlude
5. ONE MAN AND THE MULE
6. ONE MAN, THE MULE - AND ANOTHER
Last Interlude
PART II SEARCH BY THE FOUNDATION
7. ARCADIA
8. SELDON'S PLAN
9. THE CONSPIRATORS
10. APPROACHING CRISIS
1 1 . STOWAWAY
12. LORD
13. LADY
14. ANXIETY
15. THROUGH THE GRID
16. BEGINNING OF WAR
1 7. WAR
18. GHOST OF A WORLD
19. END OF WAR
20. "I KNOW..."
21 . THE ANSWER THAT SATISFIED
22. THE ANSWER THAT WAS TRUE
Prologue
The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years. It had included all the
planets of the Galaxy in a centralized rule, sometimes tyrannical, sometimes benevolent,
always orderly. Human beings had forgotten that any other form of existence could be.
All except Hari Seldon.
Hari Seldon was the last great scientist of the First Empire. It was he who brought the science
of psycho-history to its full development. Psycho-history was the quintessence of sociology, it
was the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations.
The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found,
could be treated statistically. The larger the mob, the greater the accuracy that could be
achieved. And the size of the human masses that Seldon worked with was no less than the
population of the Galaxy which in his time was numbered in the quintillions.
It was Seldon, then, who foresaw, against all common sense and popular belief, that the
brilliant Empire which seemed so strong was in a state of irremediable decay and decline. He
foresaw (or he solved his equations and interpreted its symbols, which amounts to the same
thing) that left to itself, the Galaxy would pass through a thirty thousand year period of misery
and anarchy before a unified government would rise once more.
He set about to remedy the situation, to bring about a state of affairs that would restore peace
and civilization in a single thousand of years. Carefully, he set up two colonies of scientists that
he called "Foundations." With deliberate intention, he set them up "at opposite ends of the
Galaxy." One Foundation was set up in the full daylight of publicity. The existence of the other,
the Second Foundation, was drowned in silence.
In Foundation (Gnome, 1951) and Foundation and Empire (Gnome, 1952) are told the first
three centuries of the history of the First Foundation. It began as a small community of
Encyclopedists lost in the emptiness of the outer periphery of the Galaxy. Periodically, it faced
a crisis in which the variables of human intercourse, of the social and economic currents of the
time constricted about it. Its freedom to move lay along only one certain line and when it moved
in that direction, a new horizon of development opened before it. All had been planned by Hari
Seldon, long dead now.
The First Foundation, with its superior science, took over the barbarized planets that
surrounded it. It faced the anarchic Warlords that broke away from the dying Empire and beat
them. It faced the remnant of the Empire itself under its last strong Emperor and its last strong
General and beat it.
Then it faced something which Hari Seldon could not foresee, the overwhelming power of a
single human being, a Mutant. The creature known as the Mule was born with the ability to
mold men's emotions and to shape their minds. His bitterest opponents were made into his
devoted servants. Armies could not, would not fight him. Before him, the First Foundation fell
and Seldon's schemes lay partly in ruins.
There was left the mysterious Second Foundation, the goal of all searches. The Mule must find
it to make his conquest of the Galaxy complete. The faithful of what was left of the First
Foundation must find it for quite another reason. But where was it? That no one knew.
This, then, is the story of the search for the Second Foundation!
PART I
SEARCH BY THE MULE
1
Two Men and the Mule
THE MULE It was after the fall of the First Foundation that the constructive aspects of the
Mule's regime took shape. After the definite break-up at the first Galactic Empire, it was he who
first presented history with a unified volume at space truly imperial in scope. The earlier
commercial empire at the fallen Foundation had been diverse and loosely knit, despite the
impalpable backing at the predictions of psycho-history. It was not to be compared with the
tightly controlled 'Union of Worlds' under the Mule, comprising as it did, one-tenth the volume of
the Galaxy and one-fifteenth of its population. Particularly during the era of the so-called
Search....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA *
* All quotations from the Encyclopedia Galactica here reproduced are taken from the 1 1 6th
Edition published in 1020 F.E. by the Encyclopedia Galactica Publishing Co., Terminus, with
permission of the publishers.
There is much more that the Encyclopedia has to say on the subject of the Mule and his Empire
but almost all of it is not germane to the issue at immediate hand, and most of it is considerably
too dry for our purposes in any case. Mainly, the article concerns itself at this point with the
economic conditions that led to the rise of the "First Citizen of the Union" - the Mule's official
title - and with the economic consequences thereof.
If, at any time, the writer of the article is mildly astonished at the colossal haste with which the
Mule rose from nothing to vast dominion in five years, he conceals it. If he is further surprised at
the sudden cessation of expansion in favor of a five-year consolidation of territory, he hides the
fact.
We therefore abandon the Encyclopedia and continue on our own path for our own purposes
and take up the history of the Great Interregnum - between the First and Second Galactic
Empires - at the end of that five years of consolidation.
Politically, the Union is quiet. Economically, it is prosperous. Few would care to exchange the
peace of the Mule's steady grip for the chaos that had preceded, On the worlds that five years
previously had known the Foundation, there might be a nostalgic regret, but no more. The
Foundation's leaders were dead, where useless; and Converted, where useful.
And of the Converted, the most useful was Flan Pritcher, now lieutenant general.
In the days of the Foundation, Flan Pritcher had been a captain and a member of the
underground Democratic Opposition. When the Foundation fell to the Mule without a fight,
Pritcher fought the Mule. Until, that is, he was Converted.
The Conversion was not the ordinary one brought on by the power of superior reason. Flan
Pritcher know that well enough. Fie had been changed because the Mule was a mutant with
mental powers quite capable of adjusting the conditions of ordinary humans to suit himself. But
that satisfied him completely. That was as it should be. The very contentment with the
Conversion was a prime symptom of it, but Flan Pritcher was no longer even curious about the
matter.
And now that he was returning from his fifth major expedition into the boundlessness of the
Galaxy outside the Union, it was with something approaching artless joy that the veteran
spaceman and Intelligence agent considered his approaching audience with the "First Citizen."
FHis hard face, gouged out of a dark, grainless wood that did not seem to be capable of smiling
without cracking, didn't show it - but the outward indications were unnecessary. The Mule could
see the emotions within, down to the smallest, much as an ordinary man could see the twitch of
an eyebrow.
Pritcher left his air car at the old vice-regal hangars and entered the palace grounds on foot as
was required. He walked one mile along the arrowed highway - which was empty and silent.
Pritcher knew that over the square miles of Palace grounds, there was not one guard, not one
soldier, not one armed man.
The Mule had need of no protection.
The Mule was his own best, all-powerful protector.
Pritcher's footsteps beat softly in his own cars, as the palace reared its gleaming, incredibly
light and incredibly strong metallic walls before him in the daring, overblown, near-hectic arches
that characterized the architecture of the Late Empire. It brooded strongly over the empty
grounds, over the crowded city on the horizon.
Within the palace was that one man - by himself - on whose inhuman mental attributes
depended the new aristocracy, and the whole structure of the Union.
The huge, smooth door swung massively open at the general's approach, and he entered. He
stepped on to the wide, sweeping ramp that moved upward under him. He rose swiftly in the
noiseless elevator. He stood before the small plain door of the Mule's own room in the highest
glitter of the palace spires.
It opened-
Bail Channis was young, and Bail Channis was Unconverted. That is, in plainer language, his
emotional make-up had been unadjusted by the Mule. It remained exactly as it had been
formed by the original shape of its heredity and the subsequent modifications of his
environment. And that satisfied him, too.
At not quite thirty, he was in marvelously good odor in the capital. He was handsome and
quick-witted - therefore successful in society. He was intelligent and self-possessed - therefore
successful with the Mule. And he was thoroughly pleased at both successes.
And now, for the first time, the Mule had summoned him to personal audience.
His legs carried him down the long, glittering highway that led tautly to the sponge-aluminum
spires that had been once the residence of the viceroy of Kalgan, who ruled under the old
emperors; and that had been later the residence of the independent Princes of Kalgan, who
ruled in their own name; and that was now the residence of the First Citizen of the Union, who
ruled over an empire of his own.
Channis hummed softly to himself. He did not doubt what this was all about. The Second
Foundation, naturally! That all-embracing bogey, the mere consideration of which had thrown
the Mule back from his policy of limitless expansion into static caution. The official term was -
"consolidation."
Now there were rumors - you couldn't stop rumors. The Mule was to begin the offensive once
more. The Mule had discovered the whereabouts of the Second Foundation, and would attack
The Mule had come to an agreement with the Second Foundation and divided the Galaxy. The
Mule had decided the Second Foundation did not exist and would take over all the Galaxy.
No use listing all the varieties one heard in the anterooms. It was not even the first time such
rumors had circulated. But now they seemed to have more body in them, and all the free,
expansive Souls Who thrived on war, military adventure, and political chaos and withered in
times of stability and stagnant peace were joyful.
Bail Channis was one of these. He did not fear the mysterious Second Foundation. For that
matter, he did not fear the Mule, and boasted of it. Some, perhaps, who disapproved of one at
once so young and so well-off, waited darkly for the reckoning with the gay ladies' man who
employed his wit openly at the expense of the Mule's physical appearance and sequestered
life. None dared join him and few dared laugh, but when nothing happened to him, his
reputation rose accordingly.
Channis was improvising words to the tune he was humming. Nonsense words with the
recurrent refrain: "Second Foundation threatens the Nation and all of Creation."
He was at the palace.
The huge, smooth door swung massively open at his approach and he entered. He stepped on
to the wide, sweeping ramp that moved upward under him. He rose swiftly in the noiseless
elevator. He stood before the small plain door of the Mule's own room in the highest glitter of
the palace spires.
It opened-
The man who had no name other than the Mule, and no title other than First Citizen looked out
through the one-way transparency of the wall to the light and lofty city on the horizon.
In the darkening twilight, the stars were emerging, and not one but owed allegiance to him.
He smiled with fleeting bitterness at the thought. The allegiance they owed was to a personality
few had ever seen.
He was not a man to look at, the Mule - not a man to look at without derision. Not more than
one hundred and twenty pounds was stretched out into his five-foot-eight length. His limbs were
bony stalks that jutted out of his scrawniness in graceless angularity. And his thin face was
nearly drowned out in the prominence of a fleshy beak that thrust three inches outward.
Only his eyes played false with the general farce that was the Mule. In their softness - a
strange softness for the Galaxy's greatest conqueror - sadness was never entirely subdued.
In the city was to be found all the gaiety of a luxurious capital on a luxurious world. He might
have established his capital on the Foundation, the strongest of his now-conquered enemies,
but it was far out on the very rim of the Galaxy. Kalgan, more centrally located, with a long
tradition as aristocracy's playground, suited him better - strategically.
But in its traditional gaiety, enhanced by unheard-of prosperity, he found no peace.
They feared him and obeyed him and, perhaps, even respected him - from a goodly distance.
But who could look at him without contempt? Only those he had Converted. And of what value
was their artificial loyalty? It lacked flavor. He might have adopted titles, and enforced ritual and
invented elaborations, but even that would have changed nothing. Better - or at least, no worse
- to be simply the First Citizen - and to hide himself.
There was a sudden surge of rebellion within him - strong and brutal. Not a portion of the
Galaxy must be denied him, For five years he had remained silent and buried here on Kalgan
because of the eternal, misty, space-ridden menace of the unseen, unheard, unknown Second
Foundation. Fie was thirty-two. Not old - but he felt old. His body, whatever its mutant mental
powers, was physically weak.
Every star! Every star he could see - and every star he couldnt see. It must all be his!
Revenge on all. On a humanity of which he wasn't a part. On a Galaxy in which he didn't fit.
The cool, overhead warning light flickered. Fie could follow the progress of the man who had
entered the palace, and simultaneously, as though his mutant sense had been enhanced and
sensitized in the lonely twilight, he felt the wash of emotional content touch the fibers of his
brain.
Fie recognized the identity without an effort. It was Pritcher.
Captain Pritcher of the one-time Foundation. The Captain Pritcher who had been ignored and
passed over by the bureaucrats of that decaying government. The Captain Pritcher whose job
as petty spy he had wiped out and whom he had lifted from its slime. The Captain Pritcher
whom he had made first colonel and then general; whose scope of activity he had made
Galaxywide.
The now-General Pritcher who was, iron rebel though he began, completely loyal. And yet with
all that, not loyal because of benefits gained, not loyal out of gratitude, not loyal as a fair return
- but loyal only through the artifice of Conversion.
The Mule was conscious of that strong unalterable surface layer of loyalty and love that colored
every swirl and eddy of the emotionality of Flan Pritcher - the layer he had himself implanted
five years before. Far underneath there were the original traces of stubborn individuality,
impatience of rule, idealism - but even he, himself, could scarcely detect them any longer.
The door behind him opened, and he turned. The transparency of the wall faded to opacity, and
the purple evening light gave way to the whitely blazing glow of atomic power.
Flan Pritcher took the seat indicated. There was neither bowing, nor kneeling nor the use of
honorifics in private audiences with the Mule. The Mule was merely "First Citizen." Fie was
addressed as "sir." You sat in his presence, and you could turn your back on him if it so
happened that you did.
To Flan Pritcher this was all evidence of the sure and confident power of the man. Fie was
warmly satisfied with it.
The Mule said: "Your final report reached me yesterday. I can't deny that I find it somewhat
depressing, Pritcher."
The general's eyebrows closed upon each other: "Yes, I imagine so - but I don't see to what
other conclusions I could have come. There just isn't any Second Foundation, sir."
Arid the Mule considered and then slowly shook his head, as he had done many a time before:
"There's the evidence of Ebling Mis. There is always the evidence of Ebling Mis."
It was not a new story. Pritcher said without qualification: "Mis may have been the greatest
psychologist of the Foundation, but he was a baby compared to Hari Seldon. At the time he
was investigating Seldon's works, he was under the artificial stimulation of your own brain
control. You may have pushed him too far. Fie might have been wrong. Sir, he must have been
wrong."
The Mule sighed, his lugubrious face thrust forward on its thin stalk of a neck. "If only he had
lived another minute. Fie was on the point of telling me where the Second Foundation was. Fie
knew, I'm telling you. I need not have retreated. I need not have waited and waited. So much
time lost. Five years gone for nothing."
Pritcher could not have been censorious over the weak longing of his ruler; his controlled
mental make-up forbade that. Fie was disturbed instead; vaguely uneasy. Fie said: "But what
alternative explanation can there possibly be, sir? Five times I've gone out. You yourself have
plotted the routes. And I've left no asteroid unturned. It was three hundred years ago that FHari
Seldon of the old Empire supposedly established two Foundations to act as nuclei of a new
Empire to replace the dying old one. One hundred years after Seldon, the First Foundation -
the one we know so well - was known through all the Periphery. One hundred fifty years after
Seldon - at the time of the last battle with the old Empire - it was known throughout the Galaxy.
And now it's three hundred years - and where should this mysterious Second be? In no eddy of
the Galactic stream has it been heard of."
"Ebling Mis said it kept itself secret. Only secrecy can turn its weakness to strength."
"Secrecy as deep as this is past possibility without nonexistence as well."
The Mule looked up, large eyes sharp and wary. "No. It does exist." A bony finger pointed
sharply. "There is going to be a slight change in tactics."
Pritcher frowned. "You plan to leave yourself? I would scarcely advise it."
"No, of course not. You will have to go out once again - one last time. But with another in joint
command."
There was a silence, and Pritcher's voice was hard, "Who, Sir?"
"There's a young man here in Kalgan. Bail Channis."
"I've never heard of him, Sir."
"No, I imagine not. But he's got an agile mind, he's ambitious - and he's not Converted."
Pritcher's long jaw trembled for a bare instant, "I fail to see the advantage in that."
"There is one, Pritcher. You're a resourceful and experienced man. You have given me good
service. But you are Converted. Your motivation is simply an enforced and helpless loyalty to
myself. When you lost your native motivations, you lost something, some subtle drive, that I
cannot possibly replace."
"I don't feel that, Sir," said Pritcher grimly. "I recall myself quite well as I was in the days when I
was an enemy of yours. I feel none the inferior."
"Naturally not," and the Mule’s mouth twitched into a smile. "Your judgment in this matter is
scarcely objective. This Channis, now, is ambitious - for himself. He is completely trustworthy -
out of no loyalty but to himself. He knows that it is on my coattails that he rides and he would do
anything to increase my power that the ride might be long and far and that the destination might
be glorious. If he goes with you, there is just that added push behind his seeking - that push for
himself.'
"Then," said Pritcher. still insistent, "why not remove my own Conversion, if you think that will
improve me. I can scarcely be mistrusted, now."
"That never, Pritcher. While you are within arm's reach, or blaster reach, of myself, you will
remain firmly held in Conversion. If I were to release you this minute, I would be dead the next."
The general's nostrils flared. "I am hurt that you should think so."
"I don't mean to hurt you, but it is impossible for you to realize what your feelings would be if
free to form themselves along the lines of your natural motivation. The human mind resents
control. The ordinary human hypnotist cannot hypnotize a person against his will for that
reason. I can, because I'm not a hypnotist, and, believe me, Pritcher, the resentment that you
cannot show and do not even know you possess is something I wouldn't want to face."
Pritcher's head bowed. Futility wrenched him and left him gray and haggard inside. He said with
an effort, "But how can you trust this man. I mean, completely - as you can trust me in my
Conversion."
"Well, I suppose I can't entirely. That is why you must go with him. You see, Pritcher," and the
Mule buried himself in the large armchair against the soft back of which he looked like an
angularly animated toothpick, "if he should stumble on the Second Foundation - if it should
occur to him that an arrangement with them might be more profitable than with me - You
understand?"
A profoundly satisfied light blazed in Pritcher's eyes. "That is better, Sir."
"Exactly. But remember, he must have a free rein as far as possible."
"Certainly."
"And ... uh ... Pritcher. The young man is handsome, pleasant and extremely charming. Don't
let him fool you. He's a dangerous and unscrupulous character. Don't get in his way unless
you're prepared to meet him properly. That's all."
The Mule was alone again. He let the lights die and the wall before him kicked to transparency
again. The sky was purple now, and the city was a smudge of light on the horizon.
What was it all for? And if he were the master of all there was - what then? Would it really stop
men like Pritcher. from being straight and tall, self-confident, strong? Would Bail Channis lose
his looks? Would he himself be other than he was?
He cursed his doubts. What was he really after?
The cool, overhead warning light flickered. He could follow the progress of the man who had
entered the palace and, almost against his will, he felt the soft wash of emotional content touch
the fibers of his brain.
He recognized the identity without an effort. It was Channis. Here the Mule saw no uniformity,
but the primitive diversity of a strong mind, untouched and unmolded except by the manifold
disorganizations of the Universe. It writhed in floods and waves. There was caution on the
surface, a thin, smoothing effect, but with touches of cynical ribaldry in the hidden eddies of it.
And underneath there was the strong flow of self-interest and self-love, with a gush of cruel
humor here and there, and a deep, still pool of ambition underlying all.
The Mule felt that he could reach out and dam the current, wrench the pool from its basin and
turn it in another course, dry up one flow and begin another. But what of it? If he could bend
Channis’ curly head in the profoundest adoration, would that change his own grotesquerie that
made him shun the day and love the night, that made him a recluse inside an empire that was
unconditionally big?
The door behind him opened, and he turned. The transparency of the wall faded to opacity, and
the darkness gave way to the whitely blazing artifice of atomic power.
Bail Channis sat down lightly and said: "This is a not-quite-unexpected honor, sir."
The Mule rubbed his proboscis with all four fingers at once and sounded a bit irritable in his
response. "Why so, young man?"
"A hunch, I suppose. Unless I want to admit that I've been listening to rumors."
"Rumors? Which one of the several dozen varieties are you referring to?"
"Those that say a renewal of the Galactic Offensive is being planned. It is a hope with me that
such is true and that I might play an appropriate part."
"Then you think there is a Second Foundation?"
"Why not? It would make things so much more interesting."
"And you find interest in it as well?"
"Certainly. In the very mystery of it! What better subject could you find for conjecture? The
newspaper supplements are full of nothing else lately - which is probably significant. The
Cosmos had one of its feature writers compose a weirdie about a world consisting of beings of
pure mind - the Second Foundation, you see - who had developed mental force to energies
large enough to compete with any known to physical science. Spaceships could be blasted
light-years away, planets could be turned out of their orbits-"
"Interesting. Yes. But do you have any notions on the subject? Do you subscribe to this
mind-power notion?'
"Galaxy, no! Do you think creatures like that would stay on their own planet? No, sir. I think the
Second Foundation remains hidden because it is weaker than we think."
"In that case, I can explain myself very easily. How would you like to head an expedition to
locate the Second Foundation?"
For a moment Channis seemed caught up by the sudden rush of events at just a little greater
speed than he was prepared for. His tongue had apparently skidded to a halt in a lengthening
silence.
The Mule said dryly: "Well?"
Channis corrugated his forehead. "Certainly. But where am I to go? Have you any information
available?"
"General Pritcher will be with you-"
"Then I'm not to head it?"
"Judge for yourself when I'm done. Listen, you're not of the Foundation. You're a native of
Kalgan, aren't you? Yes. Well, then, your knowledge of the Seldon plan may be vague. When
the first Galactic Empire was falling, Hari Seldon and a group of psychohistorians, analyzing the
future course of history by mathematical tools no longer available in these degenerate times,
set up two Foundations, one at each end of the Galaxy, in such a way that the economic and
sociological forces that were slowly evolving, would make them serve as foci for the Second
Empire. Hari Seldon planned on a thousand years to accomplish that - and it would have taken
thirty thousand without the Foundations. But he couldn't count on me. I am a mutant and I am
unpredictable by psychohistory which can only deal with the average reactions of numbers. Do
you understand?"
"Perfectly, sir. But how does that involve me?'
"You'll understand shortly. I intend to unite the Galaxy now - and reach Seldon's thousand-year
goal in three hundred. One Foundation - the world of physical scientists - is still flourishing,
under me. Under the prosperity and order of the Union, the atomic weapons they have
developed are capable of dealing with anything in the Galaxy - except perhaps the Second
Foundation. So I must know more about it. General Pritcher is of the definite opinion that it
does not exist at all. I know otherwise."
Channis said delicately: "How do you know, sir?"
And the Mule's words were suddenly liquid indignation: "Because minds under my control have
been interfered with. Delicately! Subtly! But not so subtly that I couldn't notice. And these
interferences are increasing, and hitting valuable men at important times. Do you wonder now
that a certain discretion has kept me motionless these years?
"That is your importance. General Pritcher is the best man left me, so he is no longer safe. Of
course, he does not know that. But you are Unconverted and therefore not instantly detectable
as a Mule's man. You may fool the Second Foundation longer than one of my own men would -
perhaps just sufficiently longer. Do you understand?"
"Um-m-m. Yes. But pardon me, sir, if I question you. How are these men of yours disturbed, so
that I might detect change in General Pritcher, in case any occurs. Are they Unconverted
again? Do they become disloyal?"
"No. I told you it was subtle. It's more disturbing than that, because its harder to detect and
sometimes I have to wait before acting, uncertain whether a key man is being normally erratic
or has been tampered with. Their loyalty is left intact, but initiative and ingenuity are rubbed out.
I'm left with a perfectly normal person, apparently, but one completely useless. In the last year,
six have been so treated. Six of my best." A corner of his mouth lifted. "They're in charge of
training bases now - and my most earnest wishes go with them that no emergencies come up
for them to decide upon."
"Suppose, sir ... suppose it were not the Second Foundation. What if it were another, such as
yourself - another mutant?"
"The planning is too careful, too long range. A single man would be in a greater hurry. No, it is a
world, and you are to be my weapon against it."
Channis' eyes shone as he said: "I'm delighted at the chance."
But the Mule caught the sudden emotional upwelling. He said: "Yes, apparently it occurs to you,
that you will perform a unique service, worthy of a unique reward - perhaps even that of being
my successor. Quite so. But there are unique punishments, too, you know. My emotional
gymnastics are not confined to the creation of loyalty alone."
And the little smile on his thin lips was grim, as Channis leaped out of his seat in horror.
For just an instant, just one, flashing instant, Channis had felt the pang of an overwhelming
grief close over him. It had slammed down with a physical pain that had blackened his mind
unbearably, and then lifted. Now nothing was left but the strong wash of anger.
The Mule said: "Anger won't help ... yes, you're covering it up now, aren't you? But I can see it.
So just remember - that sort of business can be made more intense and kept up. I've killed
men by emotional control, and there's no death crueler."
He paused: "That's all!"
The Mule was alone again. He let the lights die and the wall before him kicked to transparency
again. The sky was black, and the rising body of the Galactic Lens was spreading its
bespanglement across the velvet depths of space.
All that haze of nebula was a mass of stars so numerous that they melted one into the other
and left nothing but a cloud of light.
And all to be his—
And now but one last arrangement to make, and he could sleep.
FIRST INTERLUDE
The Executive Council of the Second Foundation was in session. To us they are merely voices.
Neither the exact scene of the meeting nor the identity of those present are essential at the
point.
Nor, strictly speaking, can we even consider an exact reproduction of any part of the session -
unless we wish to sacrifice completely even the minimum comprehensibility we have a right to
expect.
We deal here with psychologists - and not merely psychologists. Let us say, rather, scientists
with a psychological orientation. That is, men whose fundamental conception of scientific
philosophy is pointed in an entirely different direction from all of the orientations we know. The
"psychology" of scientists brought up among the axioms deduced from the observational habits
of physical science has only the vaguest relationship to PSYCFIOLOGY.
Which is about as far as I can go in explaining color to a blind man - with myself as blind as the
audience.
The point being made is that the minds assembled understood thoroughly the workings of each
other, not only by general theory but by the specific application over a long period of these
theories to particular individuals. Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a
sentence amounted almost to long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial
line - even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice.
The liberty is taken, therefore, of freely translating a small portion of the conference into the
extremely specific word-combinations necessary to minds oriented from childhood to a physical
science philosophy, even at the risk of losing the more delicate nuances.
There was one "voice" predominant, and that belonged to the individual known simply as the
First Speaker.
Fie said: "It is apparently quite definite now as to what stopped the Mule in his first mad rush. I
can't say that the matter reflects credit upon ... well, upon the organization of the situation.
Apparently, he almost located us, by means of the artificially heightened brain-energy of what
they call a 'psychologist' on the First Foundation. This psychologist was killed just before he
could communicate his discovery to the Mule. The events leading to that killing were completely
fortuitous for all calculations below Phase Three. Suppose you take over."
It was the Fifth Speaker who was indicated by an inflection of the voice. Fie said, in grim
nuances: "It is certain that the situation was mishandled. We are, of course, highly vulnerable
under mass attack, particularly an attack led by such a mental phenomenon as the Mule.
Shortly after he first achieved Galactic eminence with the conquest of the First Foundation, half
a year after to be exact, he was on Trantor. Within another half year he would have been here
and the odds would have been stupendously against us - 96.3 plus or minus 0.05% to be
exact. We have spent considerable time analyzing the forces that stopped him. We know, of
course, what was driving him on so in the first place. The internal ramifications of his physical
deformity and mental uniqueness are obvious to all of us. Flowever, it was only through
penetration to Phase Three that we could determine - after the fact- tbe possibility of his
anomalous action in the presence of another human being who had an honest affection for him.
"And since such an anomalous action would depend upon the presence of such another human
being at the appropriate time, to that extent the whole affair was fortuitous. Our agents are
certain that it was a girl that killed the Mule's psychologist - a girl for whom the Mule felt trust
out of sentiment, and whom he, therefore, did not control mentally - simply because she liked
him.
"Since that event - and for those who want the details, a mathematical treatment of the subject
has been drawn up for the Central Library - which warned us, we have held the Mule off by
unorthodox methods with which we daily risk Seldon's entire scheme of history. That is all."
The First Speaker paused an instant to allow the individuals assembled to absorb the full
implications. He said: "The situation is then highly unstable. With Seldon's original scheme bent
to the fracture point - and I must emphasize that we have blundered badly in this whole matter,
in our horrible lack of foresight - we are faced with an irreversible breakdown of the Plan. Time
is passing us by. I think there is only one solution left us - and even that is risky.
"We must allow the Mule to find us - in a sense."
Another pause, in which he gathered the reactions, then: "I repeat - in a sense!"
2
Two Men without the Mule
The ship was in near-readiness. Nothing lacked, but the destination. The Mule had suggested a
return to Trantor - the world that was the bulk of an incomparable Galactic metropolis of the
hugest Empire mankind had ever known - the dead world that had been capital of all the stars.
Pritcher disapproved. It was an old path - sucked dry.
He found Bail Channis in the ship's navigation room. The young man's curly hair was just
sufficiently disheveled to allow a single curl to droop over the forehead - as if it had been
carefully placed there - and even teeth showed in a smile that matched it. Vaguely, the stiff
officer felt himself harden against the other.
Channis' excitement was evident, "Pritcher, it's too far a coincidence."
The general said coldly: "I’m not aware of the subject of conversation."
"Oh- Well, then drag up a chair, old man, and let’s get into it. I've been going over your notes. I
find them excellent."
"How ... pleasant that you do."
"But I’m wondering if you've come to the conclusions I have. Have you ever tried analyzing the
problem deductively? I mean, it's all very well to comb the stars at random, and to have done all
you did in five expeditions is quite a bit of star-hopping. That's obvious. But have you calculated
how long it would take to go through every known world at this rate?"
"Yes. Several times," Pritcher felt no urge to meet the young man halfway, but there was the
importance of filching the other's mind - the other's uncontrolled, and hence, unpredictable,
mind.
"Well, then, suppose we're analytical about it and try to decide just what we're looking for?"
"The Second Foundation," said Pritcher, grimly.
"A Foundation of psychologists," corrected Channis, "who are is weak in physical science as
the First Foundation was weak in psychology. Well, you're from the First Foundation, which I'm
not. The implications are probably obvious to you. We must find a world which rules by virtue of
mental skills, and yet which is very backwards scientifically."
"Is that necessarily so?" questioned Pritcher, quietly. "Our own ‘Union of Worlds' isn't
backwards scientifically, even though our ruler owes his strength to his mental powers."
"Because he has the skills of the First Foundation to draw upon," came the slightly impatient
answer, "and that is the only such reservoir of knowledge in the Galaxy. The Second
Foundation must live among the dry crumbs of the broken Galactic Empire. There are no
pickings there."
"So then you postulate mental power sufficient to establish their rule over a group of worlds and
physical helplessness as well?"
"Comparative physical helplessness. Against the decadent neighboring areas, they are
competent to defend themselves. Against the resurgent forces of the Mule, with his background
of a mature atomic economy, they cannot stand. Else, why is their location so well-hidden, both
at the start by the founder, Hari Seldon, and now by themselves. Your own First Foundation
made no secret of its existence and did not have it made for them, when they were an
undefended single city on a lonely planet three hundred years ago."
The smooth lines of Pritcher's dark face twitched sardonically. 'And now that you've finished
your deep analysis, would you like a list of all the kingdoms, republics, planet states and
dictatorships of one sort or another in that political wilderness out there that correspond to your
description and to several factors besides?"
"All this has been considered then?" Channis lost none of his brashness.
"You won't find it here, naturally, but we have a completely worked out guide to the political
units of the Opposing Periphery. Really, did you suppose the Mule would work entirely
hit-and-miss?"
"Well, then" and the young man's voice rose in a burst of energy, "what of the Oligarchy of
Tazenda?"
Pritcher touched his ear thoughtfully, "Tazenda? Oh, I think I know it. They're not in the
Periphery, are they? It seems to me they're fully a third of the way towards the center of the
Galaxy."
Yes. What of that?
"The records we have place the Second Foundation at the other end of the Galaxy. Space
knows it's the only thing we have to go on. Why talk of Tazenda anyway? Its angular deviation
from the First Foundation radian is only about one hundred ten to one hundred twenty degrees
anyway. Nowhere near one hundred eighty."
"There's another point in the records. The Second Foundation was established at 'Star's End.'"
"No such region in the Galaxy has ever been located."
"Because it was a local name, suppressed later for greater secrecy. Or maybe one invented for
the purpose by Seldon and his group. Yet there's some relationship between 'Star's End' and
'Tazenda,' don't you think?"
"A vague similarity in sound? Insufficient."
'Flave you ever been there?"
"No."
"Yet it is mentioned in your records."
"Where? Oh, yes, but that was merely to take on food and water. There was certainly nothing
remarkable about the world."
"Did you land at the ruling planet? The center of government?"
"I couldn't possibly say."
Channis brooded about it under the other's cold gaze. Then, "Would you look at the Lens with
me for a moment?"
"Certainly."
The Lens was perhaps the newest feature of the interstellar cruisers of the day. Actually, it was
a complicated calculating machine which could throw on a screen a reproduction of the night
sky as seen from any given point of the Galaxy.
Channis adjusted the co-ordinate points and the wall lights of the pilot room were extinguished.
In the dim red light at the control board of the Lens, Channis' face glowed ruddily. Pritcher sat in
the pilot seat, long legs crossed, face lost in the gloom.
Slowly, as the induction period passed, the points of light brightened on the screen. And then
they were thick and bright with the generously populated star-groupings of the Galaxy's center.
"This," explained Channis, "is the winter night-sky as seen from Trantor. That is the important
point that, as far as I know, has been neglected so far in your search. All intelligent orientation
must start from Trantor as zero point. Trantor was the capital of the Galactic Empire. Even
more so scientifically and culturally, than politically. And, therefore, the significance of any
descriptive name should stem, nine times out of ten, from a Trantorian orientation. You'll
remember in this connection that, although Seldon was from Helicon, towards the Periphery,
his group worked on Trantor itself."
"What is it you're trying to show me?" Pritcher's level voice plunged icily into the gathering
enthusiasm of the other.
"The map will explain it. Do you see the dark nebula?" The shadow of his arm fell upon the
screen, which took on the bespanglement of the Galaxy. The pointing finger ended on a tiny
patch of black that seemed a hole in the speckled fabric of light. "The stellagraphical records
call it Pelot's Nebula. Watch it. I'm going to expand the image."
Pritcher had watched the phenomenon of Lens Image expansion before but he still caught his
breath. It was like being at the visiplate of a spaceship storming through a horribly crowded
Galaxy without entering hyperspace. The stars diverged towards them from a common center,
flared outwards and tumbled off the edge of the screen. Single points became double, then
globular. Hazy patches dissolved into myriad points. And always that illusion of motion.
Channis spoke through it all, "You'll notice that we are moving along the direct line from Trantor
to Pelot's Nebula, so that in effect we are still looking at a stellar orientation equivalent to that of
Trantor. There is probably a slight error because of the gravitic deviation of light that I haven't
the math to calculate for, but I'm sure it can't be significant."
The darkness was spreading over the screen. As the rate of magnification slowed, the stars
slipped off the four ends of the screen in a regretful leave-taking. At the rims of the growing
nebula, the brilliant universe of stars shone abruptly in token for that light which was merely
hidden behind the swirling unradiating atom fragments of sodium and calcium that filled cubic
parsecs of space.
And Channis pointed again, "This has been called 'The Mouth' by the inhabitants of that region
of space. And that is significant because it is only from the Trantorian orientation that it looks
like a mouth." What he indicated was a rift in the body of the Nebula, shaped like a ragged,
grinning mouth in profile, outlined by the glazing glory of the starlight with which it was filled.
"Follow The Mouth.'" said Channis. "Follow 'The Mouth' towards the gullet as it narrows down to
a thin, splintering line of light.
Again the screen expanded a trifle, until the Nebula stretched away from "The Mouth" to block
off all the screen but that narrow trickle and Channis' finger silently followed it down, to where it
straggled to a halt, and then, as his finger continued moving onward, to a spot where one single
star sparked lonesomely; and there his finger halted, for beyond that was blackness,
unrelieved.
"'Star's End,'" said the young man, simply. "The fabric of the Nebula is thin there and the light of
that one star finds its way through in just that one direction - to shine on Trantor."
"You're tying to tell me that-" the voice of the Mule's general died in suspicion.
"I'm not trying. That is Tazenda - Star's End."
The lights went on. The Lens flicked off. Pritcher reached Channis in three long strides, "What
made you think of this?"
And Channis leaned back in his chair with a queerly puzzled expression on his face. "It was
accidental. I'd like to take intellectual credit for this, but it was only accidental. In any case,
however it happens, it fits. According to our references, Tazenda is an oligarchy. It rules
twenty-seven inhabited planets. It is not advanced scientifically. And most of all, it is an obscure
world that has adhered to a strict neutrality in the local politics of that stellar region, and is not
expansionist. I think we ought to see it."
"Have you informed the Mule of this?"
"No. Nor shall we. We're in space now, about to make the first hop."
Pritcher, in sudden horror, sprang to the visiplate. Cold space met his eyes when he adjusted it.
He gazed fixedly at the view, then turned. Automatically, his hand reached for the hard,
comfortable curve of the butt of his blaster.
"By whose order?"
"By my order, general"- it was the first time Channis had ever used the other's title -"while I
was engaging you here. You probably felt no acceleration, because it came at the moment I
was expanding the field of the Lens and you undoubtedly imagined it to be an illusion of the
apparent star motion."
"Why? Just what are you doing? What was the point of your nonsense about Tazenda, then?"
"That was no nonsense. I was completely serious. We're going there. We left today because
we were scheduled to leave three days from now. General, you don't believe there is a Second
Foundation, and I do. You are merely following the Mule's orders without faith; I recognize a
serious danger. The Second Foundation has now had five years to prepare. How they've
prepared, I don't know, but what if they have agents on Kalgan. If I carry about in my mind the
knowledge of the whereabouts of the Second Foundation, they may discover that. My life might
be no longer safe, and I have a great affection for my life. Even on a thin and remote possibility
such as that, I would rather play safe. So no one knows of Tazenda but you, and you found out
only after we were out in space. And even so, there is the question of the crew." Channis was
smiling again, ironically, in obviously complete control of the situation.
Pritcher's hand fell away from his blaster, and for a moment a vague discomfort pierced him.
What kept him from action? What deadened him ? There was a time when he was a rebellious
and unpromoted captain of the First Foundation's commercial empire, when it would have been
himself rather than Channis who would have taken prompt and daring action such as that. Was
the Mule right? Was his controlled mind so concerned with obedience as to lose initiative? He
felt a thickening despondency drive him down into a strange lassitude.
He said, "Well done! However, you will consult me in the future before making decisions of this
nature."
The flickering signal caught his attention.
"That's the engine room," said Channis, casually. "They warmed up on five minutes' notice and
I asked them to let me know if there was any trouble. Want to hold the fort?"
Pritcher nodded mutely, and cogitated in the sudden loneliness on the evils of approaching fifty.
The visiplate was sparsely starred. The main body of the Galaxy misted one end. What if he
were free of the Mule's influence-
But he recoiled in horror at the thought.
Chief Engineer Huxlani looked sharply at the young, ununiformed man who carried himself with
the assurance of a Fleet officer and seemed to be in a position of authority. Huxlani, as a
regular Fleet man from the days his chin had dripped milk, generally confused authority with
specific insignia.
But the Mule had appointed this man, and the Mule was, of course, the last word. The only
word for that matter. Not even subconsciously did he question that. Emotional control went
deep.
He handed Channis the little oval object without a word.
Channis hefted it, and smiled engagingly.
"You're a Foundation man, aren't you, chief?"
"Yes, sir. I served in the Foundation Fleet eighteen years before the First Citizen took over."
"Foundation training in engineering?"
"Qualified Technician, First Class - Central School on Anacreon."
"Good enough. And you found this on the communication circuit, where I asked you to look?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Does it belong there?"
"No, Sir."
"Then what is it?"
"A hypertracer, sir."
"That's not enough. I'm not a Foundation man. What is it?"
"It's a device to allow the ship to be traced through hyperspace."
"In other words we can be followed anywhere."
"Yes, Sir."
"All right. It's a recent invention, isn't it? It was developed by one of the Research Institutes set
up by the First Citizen, wasn't it?"
"I believe so, Sir."
"And its workings are a government secret. Right?"
"I, believe so, Sir."
"Yet here it is. Intriguing."
Channis tossed the hypertracer methodically from hand to hand for a few seconds. Then,
sharply, he held it out, "Take it, then, and put it back exactly where you found it and exactly how
you found it. Understand? And then forget this incident. Entirely!"
The chief choked down his near-automatic salute, turned sharply and left.
The ship bounded through the Galaxy, its path a wide-spaced dotted line through the stars. The
dots, referred to, were the scant stretches of ten to sixty light-seconds spent in normal space
and between them stretched the hundred-and-up light-year gaps that represented the "hops"
through hyperspace.
Bail Channis sat at the control panel of the Lens and felt again the involuntary surge of
near-worship at the contemplation of it.
He was not a Foundation man and the interplay of forces at the twist of a knob or the breaking
of a contact was not second nature to him.
Not that the Lens ought quite to bore even a Foundation man. Within its unbelievably compact
body were enough electronic circuits to pin- point accurately a hundred million separate stars in
exact relationship to each other. And as if that were not a feat in itself, it was further capable of
translating any given portion of the Galactic Field along any of the three spatial axes or to rotate
any portion of the Field about a center.
It was because of that, that the Lens had performed a near-revolution in interstellar travel. In
the younger days of interstellar travel, the calculation of each "hop" through hyperspace meant
any amount of work from a day to a week - and the larger portion of such work was the more or
less precise calculation of "Ship's Position" on the Galactic scale of reference. Essentially that
meant the accurate observation of at least three widely-spaced stars, the position of which, with
reference to the arbitrary Galactic triple-zero, were known.
And it is the word "known," that is the catch. To any who know the star field well from one
certain reference point, stars are as individual as people. Jump ten parsecs, however, and not
even your own sun is recognizable. It may not even be visible.
The answer was, of course, spectroscopic analysis. For centuries, the main object of interstellar
engineering was the analysis of the "light signature" of more and more stars in greater and
greater detail. With this, and the growing precision of the "hop" itself, standard routes of travel
through the Galaxy were adopted and interstellar travel became less of an art and more of a
science.
And yet, even under the Foundation with improved calculating machines and a new method of
mechanically scanning the star field for a known "light signature," it sometimes took days to
locate three stars and then calculate position in regions not previously familiar to the pilot.
It was the Lens that changed all that. For one thing it required only a single known star. For
another, even a space tyro such as Channis could operate it.
The nearest sizable star at the moment was Vincetori, according to "hop" calculations, and on
the visiplate now, a bright star was centered. Channis hoped that it was Vincetori.
The field screen of the Lens was thrown directly next that of the visiplate and with careful
fingers, Channis punched out the co-ordinates of Vincetori. He closed a relay, and the star field
sprang to bright view. In it, too, a bright star was centered, but otherwise there seemed no
relationship. He adjusted the Lens along the Z-Axis and expanded the Field to where the
photometer showed both centered stars to be of equal brightness.
Channis looked for a second star, sizably bright, on the visiplate and found one on the field
screen to correspond. Slowly, he rotated the screen to similar angular deflection. He twisted his
mouth and rejected the result with a grimace. Again he rotated and another bright star was
brought into position, and a third. And then he grinned. That did it. Perhaps a specialist with
trained relationship perception might have clicked first try, but he'd settle for three.
That was the adjustment. In the final step, the two fields overlapped and merged into a sea of
not-quite-rightness. Most of the stars were close doubles. But the fine adjustment did not take
long. The double stars melted together, one field remained, and the "Ship's Position" could now
be read directly off the dials. The entire procedure had taken less than half an hour.
Channis found Han Pritcher in his private quarters. The general was quite apparently preparing
for bed. He looked up.
"News?"
"Not particularly. We’ll be at Tazenda in another hop."
"I know."
"I don't want to bother you if you're turning in, but have you looked through the film we picked
up in Cil?"
Han Pritcher cast a disparaging look at the article in question, where it lay in its black case
upon his low bookshelf, "Yes."
"And what do you think?"
"I think that if there was ever any science to History, it has been quite lost in this region of the
Galaxy."
Channis grinned broadly, "I know what you mean. Rather barren, isn't it?"
"Not if you enjoy personal chronicles of rulers. Probably unreachable, I should say, in both
directions. Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or
white according to the interests of the writer. I find it all remarkably useless."
"But there is talk about Tazenda. That's the point I tried to make when I gave you the film. It's
the only one I could find that even mentioned them."
"All right. They have good rulers and bad. They've conquered a few planets, won some battles,
lost a few. There is nothing distinctive about them. I don't think much of your theory, Channis."
"But you've missed a few points. Didn't you notice that they never formed coalitions? They
always remained completely outside the politics of this corner of the star swarm. As you say,
they conquered a few planets, but then they stopped - and that without any startling defeat of
consequence. It's just as if they spread out enough to protect themselves, but not enough to
attract attention."
"Very well," came the unemotional response. "I have no objection to landing. At the worst - a
little lost time."
"Oh, no. At the worst - complete defeat. If it is the Second Foundation. Remember it would be
a world of space-knows-how-many Mules."
"What do you plan to do?"
"Land on some minor subject planet. Find out as much as we can about Tazenda first, then
improvise from that."
"All right. No objection. If you don't mind now, I would like the light out."
Channis left with a wave of his hand.
And in the darkness of a tiny room in an island of driving metal lost in the vastness of space,
General Flan Pritcher remained awake, following the thoughts that led him through such
fantastic reaches.
If everything he had so painfully decided were true - and how all the facts were beginning to fit
- then Tazenda was the Second Foundation. There was no way out. But how? Flow?
Could it be Tazenda? An ordinary world? One without distinction? A slum lost amid the
wreckage of an Empire? A splinter among the fragments? Fie remembered, as from a distance,
the Mule's shriveled face and his thin voice as he used to speak of the old Foundation
psychologist, Ebling Mis, the one man who had - maybe - learned the secret of the Second
Foundation.
Pritcher recalled the tension of the Mule's words: "It was as if astonishment had overwhelmed
Mis. It was as though something about the Second Foundation had surpassed all his
expectations, had driven in a direction completely different from what he might have assumed.
If I could only have read his thoughts rather than his emotions. Yet the emotions were plain -
and above everything else was this vast surprise."
Surprise was the keynote. Something supremely astonishing! And now came this boy, this
grinning youngster, glibly joyful about Tazenda and its undistinguished subnormality. And he
had to be right. Fie had\o. Otherwise, nothing made sense.
Pritcher's last conscious thought had a touch of grimness. That hypertracer along the Etheric
tube was still there. Fie had checked it one hour back, with Channis well out of the way.
SECOND INTERLUDE
It was a casual meeting in the anteroom of the Council Chamber - just a few moments before
passing into the Chamber to take up the business of the day - and the few thoughts flashed
back and forth quickly.
"So the Mule is on his way."
"That's what I hear, too. Risky! Mighty risky!"
"Not if affairs adhere to the functions set up."
"The Mule is not an ordinary man - and it is difficult to manipulate his chosen instruments
without detection by him. The controlled minds are difficult to touch. They say he's caught on to
a few cases."
"Yes, I don't see how that can be avoided."
"Uncontrolled minds are easier. But so few are in positions of authority under him-"
They entered the Chamber. Others of the Second Foundation followed them.
3
Two Men and a Peasant
Rossem is one of those marginal worlds usually neglected in Galactic history and scarcely ever
obtruding itself upon the notice of men of the myriad happier planets.
In the latter days of the Galactic Empire, a few political prisoners had inhabited its wastes, while
an observatory and a small Naval garrison served to keep it from complete desertion. Later, in
the evil days of strife, even before the time of Hari Seldon, the weaker sort of men, tired of the
periodic decades of insecurity and danger; weary of sacked planets and a ghostly succession
of ephemeral emperors making their way to the Purple for a few wicked, fruitless years - these
men fled the populated centers and sought shelter in the barren nooks of the Galaxy.
Along the chilly wastes of Rossem, villages huddled. Its sun was a small ruddy niggard that
clutched its dribble of heat to itself, while snow beat thinly down for nine months of the year.
The tough native grain lay dormant in the soil those snow-filled months, then grew and ripened
in almost panic speed, when the sun's reluctant radiation brought the temperature to nearly
fifty.
Small, goatlike animals cropped the grasslands, kicking the thin snow aside with tiny, tri-hooved
feet.
The men of Rossem had, thus, their bread and their milk - and when they could spare an
animal - even their meat. The darkly ominous forests that gnarled their way over half of the
equatorial region of the planet supplied a tough, fine-grained wood for housing. This wood,
together with certain furs and minerals, was even worth exporting, and the ships of the Empire
came at times and brought in exchange farm machinery, atomic heaters, even televisor sets.
The last was not really incongruous, for the long winter imposed a lonely hibernation upon the
peasant.
Imperial history flowed past the peasants of Rossem. The trading ships might bring news in
impatient spurts; occasionally new fugitives would arrive - at one time, a relatively large group
arrived in a body and remained - and these usually had news of the Galaxy.
It was then that the Rossemites learned of sweeping battles and decimated populations or of
tyrannical emperors and rebellious viceroys. And they would sigh and shake their heads, and
draw their fur collars closer about their bearded faces as they sat about the village square in
the weak sun and philosophized on the evil of men.
Then after a while, no trading ships arrived at all, and life grew harder. Supplies of foreign, soft
food, of tobacco, of machinery stopped. Vague word from scraps gathered on the televisor
brought increasingly disturbing news. And finally it spread that Trantor had been sacked. The
great capital world of all the Galaxy, the splendid, storied, unapproachable and incomparable
home of the emperors had been despoiled and ruined and brought to utter destruction.
It was something inconceivable, and to many of the peasants of Rossem, scratching away at
their fields, it might well seem that the end of the Galaxy was at hand.
And then one day not unlike other days a ship arrived again. The old men of each village
nodded wisely and lifted their old eyelids to whisper that thus it had been in their father's time -
but it wasn't, quite.
This ship was not an Imperial ship. The glowing Spaceship-and-Sun of the Empire was missing
from its prow. It was a stubby affair made of scraps of older ships - and the men within called
themselves soldiers of Tazenda.
The peasants were confused. They had not heard of Tazenda, but they greeted the soldiers
nevertheless in the traditional fashion of hospitality. The newcomers inquired closely as to the
nature of the planet, the number of its inhabitants, the number of its cities - a word mistaken by
the peasants to mean "villages" to the confusion of all concerned - its type of economy and so
on.
Other ships came and proclamations were issued all over the world that Tazenda was now the
ruling world, that tax-collecting stations would be established girdling the equator - the
inhabited region - that percentages of grain and furs according to certain numerical formulae
would be collected annually.
The Rossemites had blinked solemnly, uncertain of the word "taxes." When collection time
came, many had paid, or had stood by in confusion while the uniformed, other-wordlings loaded
the harvested corn and the pelts on to the broad ground-cars.
Here and there indignant peasants banded together and brought out ancient hunting weapons
- but of this nothing ever came. Grumblingly they had disbanded when the men of Tazenda
came and with dismay watched their hard struggle for existence become harder.
But a new equilibrium was reached. The Tazendian governor lived dourly in the village of
Gentri, from which all Rossemites were barred. He and the officials under him were dim
otherworld beings that rarely impinged on the Rossemite ken. The tax-farmers, Rossemites in
the employ of Tazenda, came periodically, but they were creatures of custom now - and the
peasant had learned how to hide his grain and drive his cattle into the forest, and refrain from
having his hut appear too ostentatiously prosperous. Then with a dull, uncomprehending
expression he would greet all sharp questioning as to his assets by merely pointing at what
they could see.
Even that grew less, and taxes decreased, almost as If Tazenda wearied of extorting pennies
from such a world.
Trading sprang up and perhaps Tazenda found that more profitable. The men of Rossem no
longer received in exchange the polished creations of the Empire, but even Tazendian
machines and Tazendian food was better than the native stuff. And there were clothes for the
women of other than gray home-spun, which was a very important thing.
So once again, Galactic history glided past peacefully enough, and the peasants scrabbled life
out of the hard soil.
Narovi blew into his beard as he stepped out of his cottage.
The first snows were sifting across the hard ground and the sky was a dull, overcast pink. He
squinted carefully upward and decided that no real storm was in sight. He could travel to Gentri
without much trouble and get rid of his surplus grain in return for enough canned foods to last
the winter.
He roared back through the door, which he opened a crack for the purpose: "Has the car been
fed its fuel, yunker?"
A voice shouted from within, and then Narovi's oldest son, his short, red beard not yet
completely outgrown its boyish sparseness, joined him.
"The car," he said, sullenly, "is fueled and rides well, but for the bad condition of the axles. For
that I am of no blame. I have told you it needs expert repairs."
The old man stepped back and surveyed his son through lowering eyebrows, then thrust his
hairy chin outward: "And is the fault mine? Where and in what manner may I achieve expert
repairs? Has the harvest then been anything but scanty for five years? Have my herds escaped
the pest? Have the pelts climbed of themselves-"
"Narovi!" The well-known voice from within stopped him in mid-word. He grumbled, "Well, well -
and now your mother must insert herself into the affairs of a father and his son. Bring out the
car, and see to it that the storage trailers are securely attached."
He pounded his gloved hands together, and looked upward again. The dimly-ruddy clouds were
gathering and the gray sky that showed in the rifts bore no warmth. The sun was hidden.
He was at the point of looking away, when his dropping eyes caught and his finger almost
automatically rose on high while his mouth fell open in a shout, in complete disregard of the
cold air.
"Wife," he called vigorously, "Old woman - come here."
An indignant head appeared at a window. The woman's eyes followed his finger, gaped. With a
cry, she dashed down the wooden stairs, snatching up an old wrap and a square of linen as
she went. She emerged with the linen wrapped insecurely over her head and ears, and the
wrap dangling from her shoulders.
She snuffled: "It is a ship from outer space."
And Narovi remarked impatiently: "And what else could it be? We have visitors, old woman,
visitors!"
The ship was sinking slowly to a landing on the bare frozen field in the northern portions of
Narovi's farm.
"But what shall we do?" gasped the woman. "Can we offer these people hospitality? Is the dirt
floor of our hovel to be theirs and the pickings of last week's hoecake?"
"Shall they then go to our neighbors?" Narovi purpled past the crimson induced by the cold and
his arms in their sleek fur covering lunged out and seized the woman's brawny shoulders.
"Wife of my soul," he purred, "you will take the two chairs from our room downstairs; you will
see that a fat youngling is slaughtered and roasted with tubers; you will bake a fresh hoecake. I
go now to greet these men of power from outer space ... and ... and-" He paused, placed his
great cap awry, and scratched hesitantly. "Yes, I shall bring my jug of brewed grain as well.
Hearty drink is pleasant."
The woman's mouth had flapped idly during this speech. Nothing came out. And when that
stage passed, it was only a discordant screech that issued.
Narovi lifted a finger, "Old woman, what was it the village Elders said a se'nnight since? Eh?
Stir your memory. The Elders went from farm to farm - themselves! Imagine the importance of
it! - to ask us that should any ships from outer space land, they were to be informed
immediately on the orders of the governor.
"And now shall I not seize the opportunity to win into the good graces of those in power?
Regard that ship. Have you ever seen its like? These men from the outer worlds are rich, great.
The governor himself sends such urgent messages concerning them that the Elders walk from
farm to farm in the cooling weather. Perhaps the message is sent throughout all Rossem that
these men are greatly desired by the Lords of Tazenda - and it is on my farm that they are
landing."
He fairly hopped for anxiety, "The proper hospitality now - the mention of my name to the
governor - and what may not be ours?"
His wife was suddenly aware of the cold biting through her thin house-clothing. She leaped
towards the door, shouting over her shoulders, "Leave then quickly."
But she was speaking to a man who was even then racing towards the segment of the horizon
against which the ship sank.
Neither the cold of the world, nor its bleak, empty spaces worried General Han Pritcher. Nor the
poverty of their surroundings, nor the perspiring peasant himself.
What did bother him was the question of the wisdom of their tactics? He and Channis were
alone here.
The ship, left in space, could take care of itself in ordinary circumstances, but still, he felt
unsafe. It was Channis, of course, who was responsible for this move. He looked across at the
young man and caught him winking cheerfully at the gap in the furred partition, in which a
woman's peeping eyes and gaping mouth momentarily appeared.
Channis, at least, seemed completely at ease. That fact Pritcher savored with a vinegary
satisfaction. His game had not much longer to proceed exactly as he wished it. Yet, meanwhile
their wrist ultrawave sender-receivers were their only connection with the ship.
And then the peasant host smiled enormously and bobbed his head several times and said in a
voice oily with respect, "Noble Lords, I crave leave to tell you that my eldest son - a good,
worthy lad whom my poverty prevents from educating as his wisdom deserves - has informed
me that the Elders will arrive soon. I trust your stay here has been as pleasant as my humble
means - for I am poverty-stricken, though a hard-working, honest, and humble farmer, as
anyone here will tell you - could afford."
"Elders?" said Channis, lightly. "The chief men of the region here?"
"So they are, Noble Lords, and honest, worthy men all of them, for our entire village is known
throughout Rossem as a just and righteous spot - though living is hard and the returns of the
fields and forests meager. Perhaps you will mention to the Elders, Noble Lords, of my respect
and honor for travelers and it may happen that they will request a new motor wagon for our
household as the old one can scarcely creep and upon the remnant of it depends our
livelihood."
He looked humbly eager and Han Pritcher nodded with thee properly aloof condescension
required of the role of "Noble, Lords" bestowed upon them.
"A report of your hospitality shall reach the ears of your Elders."
Pritcher seized the next moments of isolation to speak to the apparently half-sleeping Channis.
"I am not particularly fond of this meeting of the Elders," he said. "Have you any thoughts on
the subject?"
Channis seemed surprised. "No. What worries you?"
"It seems we have better things to do than to become conspicuous here.'
Channis spoke hastily, in a low monotoned voice: "It may be necessary to risk becoming
conspicuous in our next moves. We won't find the type of men we want, Pritcher, by simply
reaching out a hand into a dark bag and groping. Men who rule by tricks of the mind need not
necessarily be men in obvious power. In the first place, the psychologists of the Second
Foundation are probably a very small minority of the total population, just as on your own First
Foundation, the technicians and scientists formed a minority. The ordinary inhabitants are
probably just that - very ordinary. The psychologists may even be well hidden, and the men in
the apparently ruling position, may honestly think they are the true masters. Our solution to that
problem may be found here on this frozen lump of a planet."
"I don't follow that at all."
"Why, see here, it's obvious enough. Tazenda is probably a huge world of millions or hundreds
of millions. How could we identify the psychologists among them and be able to report truly to
the Mule that we have located the Second Foundation? But here, on this tiny peasant world
and subject planet, an the Tazendian rulers, our host informs us, are concentrated in their chief
village of Gentri. There may be only a few hundred of them there, Pritcher, and among them
must be one or more of the men of the Second Foundation. We will go there eventually, but let
us see the Elders first - it's a logical step on the way."
They drew apart easily, as their black-bearded host tumbled into the room again, obviously
agitated.
"Noble Lords, the Elders are arriving. I crave leave to beg you once more to mention a word,
perhaps, on my behalf-" He almost bent double in a paroxysm of fawning.
"We shall certainly remember you," said Channis. "Are these your Elders?"
They apparently were. There were three.
One approached. He bowed with a dignified respect and said: "We are honored. Transportation
has been provided, Respected sirs, and we hope for the pleasure of your company at our
Meeting Hall."
THIRD INTERLUDE
The First Speaker gazed wistfully at the night sky. Wispy clouds scudded across the faint
stargleams. Space looked actively hostile. It was cold and awful at best but now it contained
that strange creature, the Mule, and the very content seemed to darken and thicken it into
ominous threat.
The meeting was over. It had not been long. There had been the doubts and questionings
inspired by the difficult mathematical problem of dealing with a mental mutant of uncertain
makeup. All the extreme permutations had had to be considered.
Were they even yet certain? Somewhere in this region of space - within reaching distance as
Galactic spaces go - was the Mule. What would he do?
It was easy enough to handle his men. They reacted - and were reacting - according to plan.
But what of the Mule himself?
4
Two Men and the Elders
The Elders of this particular region of Rossem were not exactly what one might have expected.
They were not a mere extrapolation of the peasantry; older, more authoritative, less friendly.
Not at all.
The dignity that had marked them at first meeting had grown in impression till it had reached
the mark of being their predominant characteristic.
They sat about their oval table like so many grave and slow-moving thinkers. Most were a trifle
past their physical prime, though the few who possessed beards wore them short and neatly
arranged. Still, enough appeared younger than forty to make it quite obvious that "Elders" was
a term of respect rather than entirely a literal description of age.
The two from outer space were at the head of the table and in the solemn silence that
accompanied a rather frugal meal that seemed ceremonious rather than nourishing, absorbed
the new, contrasting atmosphere.
After the meal and after one or two respectful remarks - too short and simple to be called
speeches - had been made by those of the Elders apparently held most in esteem, an
informality forced itself upon the assembly.
It was as if the dignity of greeting foreign personages had finally given way to the amiable rustic
qualities of curiosity and friendliness.
They crowded around the two strangers and the flood of questions came.
They asked if it were difficult to handle a spaceship, how many men were required for the job, if
better motors could be made for their ground-cars, if it was true that it rarely snowed on other
worlds as was said to be the case with Tazenda, how many people lived on their world, if it was
as large as Tazenda, if it was far away, how their clothes were woven and what gave them the
metallic shimmer, why they did not wear furs, if they shaved every day, what sort of stone that
was in Pritcher's ring - The list stretched out.
And almost always the questions were addressed to Pritcher as though, as the elder, they
automatically invested him with the greater authority. Pritcher found himself forced to answer at
greater and greater length. It was like an immersion in a crowd of children. Their questions
were those of utter and disarming wonder. Their eagerness to know was completely irresistible
and would not be denied.
Pritcher explained that spaceships were not difficult to handle and that crews varied with the
size, from one to many, that the motors of their ground-cars were unknown in detail to him but
could doubtless be improved, that the climates of worlds varied almost infinitely, that many
hundreds of millions lived on his world but that it was far smaller and more insignificant than the
great empire of Tazenda, that their clothes were woven of silicone plastics in which metallic
luster was artificially produced by proper orientation of the surface molecules, and that they
could be artificially heated so that furs were unnecessary, that they shaved every day, that the
stone in his ring was an amethyst. The list stretched out. He found himself thawing to these
naive provincials against his will.
And always as he answered there was a rapid chatter among the Elders, as though they
debated the information gained. It was difficult to follow these inner discussions of theirs for
they lapsed into their own accented version of the universal Galactic language that, through
long separation from the currents of living speech, had become archaic.
Almost, one might say, their curt comments among themselves hovered on the edge of
understanding, but just managed to elude the clutching tendrils of comprehension.
Until finally Channis interrupted to say, "Good sirs, you must answer us for a while, for we are
strangers and would be very much interested to know all we can of Tazenda."
And what happened then was that a great silence fell and each of the hitherto voluble Elders
grew silent. Their hands, which had been moving in such rapid and delicate accompaniment to
their words as though to give them greater scope and varied shades of meaning, fell suddenly
limp. They stared furtively at one another, apparently quite willing each to let the other have all
the floor.
Pritcher interposed quickly, "My companion asks this in friendliness, for the fame of Tazenda
fills the Galaxy and we, of course, shall inform the governor of the loyalty and love of the Elders
of Rossem."
No sigh of relief was heard but faces brightened. An Elder stroked his beard with thumb and
forefinger, straightening its slight curl with a gentle pressure, and said: "We are faithful servants
of the Lords of Tazenda."
Pritcher's annoyance at Channis' bald question subsided. It was apparent, at least, that the age
that he had felt creeping over him of late had not yet deprived him of his own capacity for
making smooth the blunders of others.
He continued: "We do not know, in our far part of the universe, much of the past history of the
Lords of Tazenda. We presume they have ruled benevolently here for a long time."
The same Elder who spoke before, answered. In a soft, automatic way he had become
spokesman. He said: "Not the grandfather of the oldest can recall a time in which the Lords
were absent."
"It has been a time of peace?"
"It has been a time of peace!" He hesitated. "The governor is a strong and powerful Lord who
would not hesitate to punish traitors. None of us are traitors, of course."
"He has punished some in the past, I imagine, as they deserve."
Again hesitation, "None here have ever been traitors, or our fathers or our fathers' fathers. But
on other worlds, there have been such, and death followed for them quickly. It is not good to
think of for we are humble men who are poor farmers and not concerned with matters of
politics."
The anxiety in his voice, the universal concern in the eyes of all of them was obvious.
Pritcher said smoothly: "Could you inform us as to how we can arrange an audience with your
governor."
And instantly an element of sudden bewilderment entered the situation.
For after a long moment, the elder said: "Why, did you not know? The governor will be here
tomorrow. He has expected you. It has been a great honor for us. We ... we hope earnestly that
you will report to him satisfactorily as to our loyalty to him."
Pritcher's smile scarcely twitched. "Expected us?"
The Elder looked wonderingly from one to the other. "Why ... it is now a week since we have
been waiting for you."
Their quarters were undoubtedly luxurious for the world. Pritcher had lived in worse. Channis
showed nothing but indifference to externals.
But there was an element of tension between them of a different nature than hitherto. Pritcher,
felt the time approaching for a definite decision and yet there was still the desirability of
additional waiting. To see the governor first would be to increase the gamble to dangerous
dimensions and yet to win that gamble might multi-double the winnings. He felt a surge of
anger at the slight crease between Channis' eyebrows, the delicate uncertainty with which the
young man's lower lip presented itself to an upper tooth. He detested the useless play-acting
and yearned for an end to it.
He said: "We seem to be anticipated."
'Yes," said Channis, simply.
"Just that? You have no contribution of greater pith to make. We come here and find that the
governor expects us. Presumably we shall find from the governor that Tazenda itself expects
us. Of what value then is our entire mission?"
Channis looked up, without endeavoring to conceal the weary note in his voice: "To expect us
is one thing; to know who we are and what we came for, is another."
"Do you expect to conceal these things from men of the Second Foundation?"
"Perhaps. Why not? Are you ready to throw your hand in? Suppose our ship was detected in
space. Is it unusual for a realm to maintain frontier observation posts? Even if we were ordinary
strangers, we would be of interest."
"Sufficient interest for a governor to come to us rather than the reverse?'
Channis shrugged: "We’ll have to meet that problem later. Let us see what this governor is
like."
Pritcher bared his teeth in a bloodless kind of scowl. The situation was becoming ridiculous.
Channis proceeded with an artificial animation: "At least we know one thing. Tazenda is the
Second Foundation or a million shreds of evidence are unanimously pointing the wrong way.
How do you interpret the obvious terror in which these natives hold Tazenda? I see no signs of
political domination. Their groups of Elders apparently meet freely and without interference of
any sort. The taxation they speak of doesn't seem at all extensive to me or efficiently carried
through. The natives speak much of poverty but seem sturdy and well-fed. The houses are
uncouth and their villages rude, but are obviously adequate for the purpose.
"In fact, the world fascinates me. I have never seen a more forbidding one, yet I am convinced
there is no suffering among the population and that their uncomplicated lives manage to
contain a well-balanced happiness lacking in the sophisticated populations of the advanced
centers."
"Are you an admirer of peasant virtues, then?"
"The stars forbid." Channis seemed amused at the idea. "I merely point out the significance of
all this. Apparently, Tazenda is an efficient administrator - efficient in a sense far different from
the efficiency of the old Empire or of the First Foundation, or even of our own Union. All these
have brought mechanical efficiency to their subjects at the cost of more intangible values.
Tazenda brings happiness and sufficiency. Don't you see that the whole orientation of their
domination is different? It is not physical, but psychological."
"Really?" Pritcher, allowed himself irony. "And the terror with which the Elders spoke of the
punishment of treason by these kind hearted psychologist administrators? How does that suit
your thesis?"
"Were they the objects of the punishment? They speak of punishment only of others. It is as if
knowledge of punishment has been so well implanted in them that punishment itself need never
be used. The proper mental attitudes are so inserted into their minds that I am certain that not a
Tazendian soldier exists on the planet. Don't you see all this?"
"I’ll see perhaps," said Pritcher, coldly, "when I see the governor. And what, by the way, if our
mentalities are handled?"
Channis replied with brutal contempt: "You should be accustomed to that."
Pritcher whitened perceptibly, and, with an effort, turned away. They spoke to one another no
more that day.
It was in the silent windlessness of the frigid night, as he listened to the soft, sleeping motions
of the other, that Pritcher silently adjusted his wrist-transmitter to the ultrawave region for which
Channis' was unadjustable and, with noiseless touches of his fingernail, contacted the ship.
The answer came in little periods of noiseless vibration that barely lifted themselves above the
sensory threshold.
Twice Pritcher asked: "Any communications at all yet?"
Twice the answer came: "None. We wait always."
He got out of bed. It was cold in the room and he pulled the furry blanket around him as he sat
in the chair and stared out at the crowding stars so different in the brightness and complexity of
their arrangement from the even fog of the Galactic Lens that dominated the night sky of his
native Periphery.
Somewhere there between the stars was the answer to the complications that overwhelmed
him, and he felt the yearning for that solution to arrive and end things.
For a moment he wondered again if the Mule were right - if Conversion had robbed him of the
firm sharp edge of self-reliance. Or was it simply age and the fluctuations of these last years?
He didn't really care.
He was tired.
The governor of Rossem arrived with minor ostentation. His only companion was the uniformed
man at the controls of the ground-car.
The ground-car itself was of lush design but to Pritcher it appeared inefficient. It turned
clumsily; more than once it apparently balked at what might have been a too-rapid change of
gears. It was obvious at once from its design that it ran on chemical, and not on atomic, fuel.
The Tazendian governor stepped softly on to the thin layer of snow and advanced between two
lines of respectful Elders. He did not look at them but entered quickly. They followed after him.
From the quarters assigned to them, the two men of the Mule's Union watched. He - the
governor -was thickset, rather stocky, short, unimpressive.
But what of that?
Pritcher cursed himself for a failure of nerve. His face, to be sure, remained icily calm. There
was no humiliation before Channis - but he knew very well that his blood pressure had
heightened and his throat had become dry.
It was not a case of physical fear. He was not one of those dull-witted, unimaginative men of
nerveless meat who were too stupid ever to be afraid - but physical fear he could account for
and discount.
But this was different. It was the other fear.
He glanced quickly at Channis. The young man glanced idly at the nails of one hand and poked
leisurely at some trifling unevenness.
Something inside Pritcher became vastly indignant. What had Channis to fear of mental
handling?
Pritcher caught a mental breath and tried to think back. How had he been before the Mule had
Converted him from the die-hard Democrat that he was. It was hard to remember. He could not
place himself mentally. He could not break the clinging wires that bound him emotionally to the
Mule. Intellectually, he could remember that he had once tried to assassinate the Mule but not
for all the straining he could endure, could he remember his emotions at the time. That might
be the self-defense of his own mind, however, for at the intuitive thought of what those
emotions might have been - not realizing the details, but merely comprehending the drift of it -
his stomach grew queasy.
What if the governor tampered with his mind?
What if the insubstantial mental tendrils of a Second Foundationer insinuated itself down the
emotional crevices of his makeup and pulled them apart and rejoined them?
There had been no sensation the first time. There had been no pain, no mental jar - not even a
feeling of discontinuity. He had always loved the Mule. If there had ever been a time long
before - as long before as five short years - when he had thought he hadn't loved him, that he
had hated him - that was just a horrid illusion. The thought of that illusion embarrassed him.
But there had been no pain.
Would meeting the governor duplicate that? Would all that had gone before - all his service for
the Mule - all his life's orientation - join the hazy, other-life dream that held the word,
Democracy. The Mule also a dream, and only to Tazenda, his loyalty—
Sharply, he turned away.
There was that strong desire to retch.
And then Channis' voice clashed on his ear, "I think this is it, general."
Pritcher turned again. An Elder had opened the door silently and stood with a dignified and
calm respect upon the threshold.
He said, "His Excellency, Governor of Rossem, in the name of the Lords of Tazenda, is pleased
to present his permission for an audience and request your appearance before him."
"Sure thing," and Channis tightened his belt with a jerk and adjusted a Rossemian hood over
his head.
Pritcher's jaw set. This was the beginning of the real gamble.
The governor of Rossem was not of formidable appearance. For one thing, he was
bareheaded, and his thinning hair, light brown, tending to gray, lent him mildness. His bony
eye-ridges lowered at them, and his eyes, set in a fine network of surrounding wrinkles,
seemed calculating, but his fresh-cropped chin was soft and small and, by the universal
convention of followers of the pseudoscience of reading character by facial bony structure,
seemed "weak."
Pritcher, avoided the eyes and watched the chin. He didn't know whether that would be
effective - if anything would be.
The governor's voice was high-pitched, indifferent: "Welcome to Tazenda. We greet you in
peace. You have eaten?"
His hand - long fingers, gnarled veins - waved almost regally at the U-shaped table.
They bowed and sat down. The governor sat at the outer side of the base of the U, they on the
inner; along both arms sat the double row of silent Elders.
The governor spoke in short, abrupt sentences - praising the food as Tazendian importations -
and it had indeed a quality different if, somehow, not so much better, than the rougher food of
the Elders - disparaging Rossemian weather, referring with an attempt at casualness to the
intricacies of space travel.
Channis talked little. Pritcher not at all.
Then it was over. The small, stewed fruits were finished; the napkins used and discarded, and
the governor leaned back.
His small eyes sparkled.
"I have inquired as to your ship. Naturally, I would like to see that it receives due care and
overhaul. I am told its whereabouts are unknown."
"True." Channis replied lightly. "We have left it in space. It is a large ship, suitable for long
journeys in sometimes hostile regions, and we felt that landing it here might give rise to doubts
as to our peaceful intentions. We preferred to land alone, unarmed."
"A friendly act," commented the governor, without conviction. "A large ship, you say?"
"Not a vessel of war, excellency."
"Ha, hum. Where is it you come from?"
"A small world of the Santanni sector, your excellency. It may be you are not aware of its
existence for it lacks importance. We are interested in establishing trade relationships."
"Trade, eh? And what have you to sell?'
"Machines of all sorts, excellency. In return, food, wood, ores
"Ha, hum." The governor seemed doubtful. "I know little these matters. Perhaps mutual profit
may be arranged. Perhaps, after I have examined your credentials at length - for much
information will be required by my government before matters may proceed, you understand -
and after I have looked over your ship, it would be advisable for you to proceed to Tazenda."
There was no answer to that, and the governor's attitude iced perceptibly.
"It is necessary that I see your ship, however."
Channis said distantly: "The ship, unfortunately, is undergoing repairs at the moment. If your
excellency would not object giving us forty-eight hours, it will be at your service."
"I am not accustomed to waiting."
For the first time, Pritcher met the glare of the other, eye to eye, and his breath exploded softly
inside him. For a moment, he had the sensation of drowning, but then his eyes tore away.
Channis did not waver. He said: "The ship cannot be landed for forty-eight hours, excellency.
We are here and unarmed. Can you doubt our honest intentions?"
There was a long silence, and then the governor said gruffly, "Tell me of the world from which
you come."
That was all. It passed with that. There was no more unpleasantness. The governor, having
fulfilled his official duty, apparently lost interest and the audience died a dull death.
And when it was all over, Pritcher found himself back in their quarters and took stock of himself.
Carefully - holding his breath - he "felt" his emotions. Certainly he seemed no different to
himself, but would he feel any difference? Had he felt different after the Mule's Conversion?
Had not everything seemed natural? As it should have been?
He experimented.
With cold purpose, he shouted inside the silent caverns of his mind, and the shout was, "The
Second Foundation must be discovered and destroyed."
And the emotion that accompanied it was honest hate. There was not as much as a hesitation
involved in it.
And then it was in his mind to substitute the word "Mule" for the phrase "Second Foundation"
and his breath caught at the mere emotion and his tongue clogged.
So far, good.
But had he been handled otherwise - more subtly? Had tiny changes been made? Changes
that he couldn't detect because their very existence warped his judgment.
There was no way to tell.
But he still felt absolute loyalty to the Mule! If that were unchanged, nothing else really
mattered.
He turned his mind to action again. Channis was busy at his end of the room. Pritcher's
thumbnail idled at his wrist communicator.
And then at the response that came he felt a wave of relief surge over him and leave him weak.
The quiet muscles of his face did not betray him, but inside he was shouting with joy - and
when Channis turned to face him, he knew that the farce was about over.
FOURTH INTERLUDE
The two Speakers passed each other on the road and one stopped the other.
"I have word from the First Speaker."
There was a half-apprehensive flicker in the other's eyes. "Intersection point?"
"Yes! May we live to see the dawn!"
5
One Man and the Mule
There was no sign in any of Channis' actions that he was aware of any subtle change in the
attitude of Pritcher, and in their relations to each other. He leaned back on the hard wooden
bench and spread-eagled his feet out in front of him.
"What did you make of the governor?"
Pritcher shrugged: "Nothing at all. He certainly seemed no mental genius to me. A very poor
specimen of the Second Foundation, if that's what he was supposed to be."
"I don't think he was, you know. I'm not sure what to make of it. Suppose you were a Second
Foundationer," Channis grew thoughtful, "what would yoi/do? Suppose you had an idea of our
purpose here. How would you handle us?"
"Conversion, of course."
"Like the Mule?" Channis looked up, sharply. "Would we know if they had converted us? I
wonder- And what if they were simply psychologists, but very clever ones."
"In that case, I'd have us killed rather quickly."
"And our ship? No." Channis wagged a forefinger. "We're playing a bluff, Pritcher, old man. It
can only be a bluff. Even if they have emotional control down pat, we - you and I - are only
fronts. It's the Mule they must fight, and they're being just as careful of us as we are of them.
I'm assuming that they know who we are."
Pritcher, stared coldly: "What do you intend doing?"
"Wait." The word was bitten off. "Let them come to us. They're worried, maybe about the ship,
but probably about the Mule. They bluffed with the governor. It didn't work. We stayed pat. The
next person they'll send will be a Second Foundationer, and he’ll propose a deal of some sort."
"And then?"
"And then we make the deal."
"I don't think so."
"Because you think it will double-cross the Mule? It won't."
"No, the Mule could handle your double-crosses, any you could invent. But I still don't think so."
"Because you think then we couldn't double-cross the Foundationers?"
"Perhaps not. But that’s not the reason."
Channis let his glance drop to what the other held in his fist, and said grimly: "You mean that's
the reason."
Pritcher cradled his blaster, "That's right. You are under arrest."
"Why?"
"For treason to the First Citizen of the Union."
Channis' lips hardened upon one another: "What's going on?"
"Treason! As I said. And correction of the matter, on my part."
"Your proof? Or evidence, assumptions, daydreams? Are you mad?"
"No. Are you? Do you think the Mule sends out unweaned youngsters on ridiculous
swashbuckling missions for nothing? It was queer to me at the time. But I wasted time in
doubting myself. Why should he send you? Because you smile and dress well? Because you're
twenty-eight."
"Perhaps because I can be trusted. Or aren't you in the market for logical reasons?"
"Or perhaps because you can't be trusted. Which is logical enough, as it turns out."
"Are we matching paradoxes, or is this all a word game to see who can say the least in the
most words?"
And the blaster advanced, with Pritcher after it. Fie stood erect before the younger man: "Stand
up!"
Channis did so, in no particular hurry, and felt the muzzle of the blaster touch his belt with no
shrinking of the stomach muscles.
Pritcher said: "What the Mule wanted was to find the Second Foundation. Fie had failed and I
had failed, and the secret that neither of us can find is a well-hidden one. So there was one
outstanding possibility left - and that was to find a seeker who ready knew the hiding-place."
"Is that I?"
"Apparently it was. I didn't know then, of course, but though my mind must be slowing, it still
points in the right direction. Flow easily we found Star's End! Flow miraculously you examined
the correct Field Region of the Lens from among an infinite number of possibles! And having
done so, how nicely we observe just the correct point for observation! You clumsy fool! Did you
so underestimate me that no combination of impossible fortuties struck you as being too much
for me to swallow?"
"You mean I've been too successful?"
"Too successful by half for any loyal man."
"Because the standards of success you set me were so low?"
And the blaster prodded, though in the face that confront Channis only the cold glitter of the
eyes betrayed the growing anger: "Because you are in the pay of the Second Foundation."
"Pay?"- infinite contempt. "Prove that."
"Or under the mental influence."
"Without the Mule's knowledge? Ridiculous."
"With the Mule's knowledge. Exactly my point, my you dullard. With the Mule's knowledge. Do
you suppose else that you would be given a ship to play with? You led us to the Second
Foundation as you were supposed to do."
"I thresh a kernel of something or other out of this immensity of chaff. May I ask why I'm
supposed to be doing all this? If were a traitor, why should I lead you to the Second
Foundation? Why not hither and yon through the Galaxy, skipping gaily, finding no more than
you ever did?'
"For the sake of the ship. And because the men of the Second Foundation quite obviously need
atomic warfare for self-defense."
'You'll have to do better than that. One ship won't mean thing to them, and if they think they'll
learn science from it a build atomic power plants next year, they are very, very simple Second
Foundationers, indeed. On the order of simplicity as yourself, I should say."
"You will have the opportunity to explain that to the Mule."
"We're going back to Kalgan?"
"On the contrary. We're staying here. And the Mule will join us in fifteen minutes - more or less.
Do you think he hasn't followed us, my sharp-witted, nimble-minded lump of self-admiration?
You have played the decoy well in reverse. You may not have led our victims to us, but you
have certainly led us to our victims."
"May I sit down," said Channis, "and explain something to you in picture drawings? Please."
"You will remain standing."
At that, I can say it as well standing. You think the Mule followed us because of the hypertracer
on the communication circuit?"
The blaster might have wavered. Channis wouldn't have sworn to it. Fie said: "You don't look
surprised. But I don't waste time doubting that you feel surprised. Yes, I knew about it. And
now, having shown you that I knew of something you didn't think I did, I'll tell you something
you don't know, that I know you don't."
"You allow yourself too many preliminaries, Channis. I should think your sense of invention was
more smoothly greased.
"There's on invention to this. There have been traitors, of course, or enemy agents, if you prefer
that term. But the Mule knew of that in a rather curious way. It seems, you see, that some of his
Converted men had been tampered with."
The blaster did waver that time. Unmistakably.
"I emphasize that, Pritcher. It was why he needed me. I was an Unconverted man. Didn't he
emphasize to you that he needed an Unconverted? Whether he gave you the real reason or
not?"
"Try something else, Channis. If I were against the Mule, I'd know it." Quietly, rapidly, Pritcher
was feeling his mind. It felt the same. It felt the same. Obviously the man was lying.
"You mean you feel loyal to the Mule. Perhaps. Loyalty wasn't tampered with. Too easily
detectable, the Mule said. But how do you feel mentally? Sluggish? Since you started this trip,
have you always felt normal? Or have you felt strange sometimes, as though you weren't quite
yourself? What are you trying to do, bore a hole through me without touching the trigger?"
Pritcher withdrew his blaster half an inch, "What are you trying to say?"
"I say that you've been tampered with. You've been handled. You didn't see the Mule install that
hypertracer. You didn't see anyone do it. You just found it there, and assumed it was the Mule,
and ever since you've been assuming he was following us. Sure, the wrist receiver you're
wearing contacts the ship on a wave length mine isn't good for. Do you think I didn't know
that?" He was speaking quickly now, angrily. His cloak of indifference had dissolved into
savagery. "But it's not the Mule that's coming toward us from out there. It's not the Mule."
"Who, if not?"
"Well, who do you suppose? I found that hypertracer, the day we left. But I didn't think it was
the Mule. He had no reason for indirection at that point. Don't you see the nonsense of it? If I
were a traitor and he knew that, I could be Converted as easily as you were, and he would
have the secret of the location of the Second Foundation out of my mind without sending me
half across the Galaxy. Can you keep a secret from the Mule? And if / didn't know, then I
couldn't lead him to it. So why send me in either case?
"Obviously, that hypertracer must have been put there by an agent of the Second Foundation.
That's who's coming towards us now. And would you have been fooled if your precious mind
hadn't been tampered with? What kind of normality have you that you imagine immense folly to
be wisdom? Me bring a ship to the Second Foundation? What would they do with a ship?
"It's you they want, Pritcher. You know more about the Union than anyone but the Mule, and
you're not dangerous to them while he is. That’s why they put the direction of search into my
mind. Of course, it was completely impossible for me to find Tazenda by random searchings of
the Lens. I knew that. But I knew there was the Second Foundation after us, and I knew they
engineered it. Why not play their game? It was a battle of bluffs. They wanted us and I wanted
their location - and space take the one that couldn't outbluff the other.
"But it's we that will lose as long as you hold that blaster on me. And it obviously isn't your idea.
It's theirs. Give me the blaster, Pritcher. I know it seems wrong to you, but it isn't your mind
speaking, it's the Second Foundation within you. Give me the blaster, Pritcher, and we’ll face
what's coming now, together."
Pritcher, faced a growing confusion in horror. Plausibility! Could he be so wrong? Why this
eternal doubt of himself? Why wasn't he sure? What made Channis sound so plausible?
Plausibility!
Or was it his own tortured mind fighting the invasion of the alien.
Was he split in two?
Hazily, he saw Channis standing before him, hand outstretched - and suddenly, he knew he
was going to give him the blaster.
And as the muscles of his arm were on the point of contracting in the proper manner to do so,
the door opened, not hastily, behind him - and he turned.
There are perhaps men in the Galaxy who can be confused for one another even by men at
their peaceful leisure. Correspondingly, there may be conditions of mind when even unlikely
pairs may be mis-recognized. But the Mule rises above any combination of the two factors.
Not all Pritcher's agony of mind prevented the instantaneous mental flood of cool vigor that
engulfed him.
Physically, the Mule could not dominate any situation. Nor did he dominate this one.
He was rather a ridiculous figure in his layers of clothing that thickened him past his normality
without allowing him to reach normal dimensions even so. His face was muffled and the usually
dominant beak covered what was left in a cold-red prominence.
Probably as a vision of rescue, no greater incongruity could exist.
He said: "Keep your blaster, Pritcher."
Then he turned to Channis, who had shrugged and seated himself: "The emotional context
here seems rather confusing and considerably in conflict. What's this about someone other
than myself following you?"
Pritcher intervened sharply: "Was a hypertracer placed upon our ship by your orders, sir?"
The Mule turned cool eyes upon him, "Certainly. Is it very likely that any organization in the
Galaxy other than the Union of Worlds would have access to it?'
"He said-"
"Well, he's here, general. Indirect quotation is not necessary. Have you been saying anything,
Channis?"
"Yes. But mistakes apparently, sir. It has been my opinion that the tracer was put there by
someone in the pay of the Second Foundation and that we had been led here for some
purpose of theirs, which I was prepared to counter. I was under the further impression that the
general was more or less in their hands."
"You sound as if you think so no longer."
"I'm afraid not. Or it would not have been you at the door."
"Well, then, let us thresh this out." The Mule peeled off the outer layers of padded, and
electrically heated clothing. "Do you mind if I sit down as well? Now - we are safe here and
perfectly free of any danger of intrusion. No native of this lump of ice will have any desire to
approach this place. I assure you of that," and there was a grim earnestness about his
insistence upon his powers.
Channis showed his disgust. "Why privacy? Is someone going to serve tea and bring out the
dancing girls?"
"Scarcely. What was this theory of yours, young man? A Second Foundationer was tracing you
with a device which no one but I have and - how did you say you found this place?"
"Apparently, sir, it seems obvious, in order to account for known facts, that certain notions have
been put into my head-"
"By these same Second Foundationers?"
"No one else, I imagine."
"Then it did not occur to you that if a Second Foundationer could force, or entice, or inveigle
you into going to the Second Foundation for purposes of his own - and I assume you imagined
he used methods similar to mine, though, mind you, I can implant only emotions, not ideas - it
did not occur to you that if he could do that there was little necessity to put a hypertracer on
you.
And Channis looked up sharply and met his sovereign's large eyes with sudden startle. Pritcher
grunted and a visible relaxation showed itself in his shoulders.
"No," said Channis, "that hadn't occurred to me."
"Or that if they were obliged to trace you, they couldn't feel capable of directing you, and that,
undirected, you could have precious little chance of finding your way here as you did. Did that
occur to you?"
"That, neither."
"Why not? Flas your intellectual level receded to a so-much-greater-than-probable degree?"
"The only answer is a question, sir. Are you joining General Pritcher in accusing me of being a
traitor?"
"You have a defense in case I am?"
"Only the one I presented to the general. If I were a traitor and knew the whereabouts of the
Second Foundation, you could Convert me and learn the knowledge directly. If you felt it
necessary to trace me, then I hadn't the knowledge beforehand and wasn't a traitor. So I
answer your paradox with another."
"Then your conclusion?"
"That I am not a traitor."
"To which I must agree, since your argument is irrefutable."
"Then may I ask you why you had us secretly followed?"
"Because to all the facts there is a third explanation. Both you and Pritcher explained some
facts in your own individual ways, but not all. I - if you can spare me the time - will explain all.
And in a rather short time, so there is little danger of boredom. Sit down, Pritcher, and give me
your blaster. There is no danger of attack on us any longer. None from in here and none from
out there. None in fact even from the Second Foundation. Thanks to you, Channis."
The room was lit in the usual Rossemian fashion of electrically heated wire. A single bulb was
suspended from the ceiling and in its dim yellow glow, the three cast their individual shadows.
The Mule said: "Since I felt it necessary to trace Channis, it was obvious I expect to gain
something thereby. Since he went to the Second Foundation with a startling speed and
directness, we can reasonably assume that that was what I was expecting to happen. Since I
did not gain the knowledge from him directly, something must have been preventing me. Those
are the facts. Channis, of course, knows the answer. So do I. Do you see it, Pritcher?"
And Pritcher said doggedly: "No, sir."
"Then I’ll explain. Only one kind of man can both know the location of the Second Foundation
and prevent me from learning it. Channis, I'm afraid you're a Second Foundationer yourself."
And Channis' elbows rested on his knees as he leaned forward, and through stiff and angry lips
said: "What is your direct evidence? Deduction has proven wrong twice today."
"There is direct evidence, too, Channis. It was easy enough. I told you that my men had been
tampered with. The tamperer must have been, obviously, someone who was a) Unconverted,
and b) fairly close to the center of things. The field was large but not entirely unlimited. You
were too successful, Channis. People liked you too much. You got along too well. I wondered-
"And then I summoned you to take over this expedition and it didn't set you back. I watched
your emotions. It didn't bother you. You overplayed the confidence there, Channis. No man of
real competence could have avoided a dash of uncertainty at a job like that. Since your mind
did avoid it, it was either a foolish one or a controlled one.
It was easy to test the alternatives. I seized your mind at a moment of relaxation and filled it
with grief for an instant and then removed it. You were angry afterwards with such
accomplished art that I could have sworn it was a natural reaction, but for that which went first.
For when I wrenched at your emotions, for just one instant, for one tiny instant before you could
catch yourself, your mind resisted. It was all I needed to know.
"No one could have resisted me, even for that tiny instant, without control similar to mine."
Channis' voice was low and bitter: "Well, then? Now what?"
"And now you die - as a Second Foundationer. Quite necessary, as I believe you realize."
And once again Channis stared into the muzzle of a blaster. A muzzle guided this time by a
mind, not like Pritcher's capable of offhand twisting to suit himself, but by one as mature as his
own and as resistant to force as his own.
And the period of time allotted him for a correction of events was small.
What followed thereafter is difficult to describe by one with the normal complement of senses
and the normal incapacity for emotional control.
Essentially, this is what Channis realized in the tiny space of time involved in the pushing of the
Mule's thumb upon the trigger contact.
The Mule's current emotional makeup was one of a hard and polished determination, unmisted
by hesitation in the least. Had Channis been sufficiently interested afterward to calculate the
time involved from the determination to shoot to the arrival of the disintegrating energies, he
might have realized that his leeway was about one-fifth of a second.
That was barely time.
What the Mule realized in that same tiny space of time was that the emotional potential of
Channis' brain had surged suddenly upwards without his own mind feeling any impact and that,
simultaneously, a flood of pure, thrilling hatred cascaded upon him from an unexpected
direction.
It was that new emotional element that jerked his thumb off the contact. Nothing else could
have done it, and almost together with his change of action, came complete realization of the
new situation.
It was a tableau that endured far less than the significance adhering to it should require from a
dramatic standpoint. There was the Mule, thumb off the blaster, staring intently upon Channis
There was Channis taut, not quite daring to breathe yet. And there was Pritcher, convulsed in
his chair; every muscle at a spasmodic breaking point; every tendon writhing in an effort to hurl
forward; his face twisted at last out of schooled woodenness into an unrecognizable death
mask of horrid hate; and his eyes only and entirely and supremely upon the Mule.
Only a word or two passed between Channis and the Mule - only a word or two and that utterly
revealing stream of emotional consciousness that remains forever the true interplay of
understanding between such as they. For the sake of our own limits, it is necessary to translate
into words what went on, then, and thenceforward.
Channis said, tensely: "You’re between two fires, First Citizen. You can't control two minds
simultaneously, not when one of them is mine - so you have your choice. Pritcher, is free of
your Conversion now. I've snapped the bonds. He's the old Pritcher; the one who tried to kill
you once; the one who thinks you're the enemy of all that is free and right and holy; and he's
the one besides who knows that you've debased him to helpless adulation for five years. I'm
holding him back now by suppressing his will, but if you kill me, that ends, and in considerably
less time than you could shift your blaster or even your will - he will kill you."
The Mule quite plainly realized that. He did not move.
Channis continued: "If you turn to place him under control, to kill him, to do anything, you won't
ever be quick enough to turn again to stop me."
The Mule still did not move. Only a soft sigh of realization.
"So," said Channis, "throw down the blaster, and let us be on even terms again, and you can
have Pritcher back."
"I made a mistake," said the Mule, finally. "It was wrong to have a third party present when I
confronted you. It introduced one variable too many. It is a mistake that must be paid for, I
suppose."
He dropped the blaster carelessly, and kicked it to the other end of the room. Simultaneously,
Pritcher crumpled into profound sleep.
"He’ll be normal when he awakes," said the Mule, indifferently.
The entire exchange from the time the Mule's thumb had begun pressing the trigger-contact to
the time he dropped the blaster had occupied just under a second and a half of time.
But just beneath the borders of consciousness, for a time just above the borders of detection,
Channis caught a fugitive emotional gleam in the Mule's mind. And it was still one of sure and
confident triumph.
6
One Man, the Mule - and Another
Two men, apparently relaxed and entirely at ease, poles apart physically - with every nerve
that served as emotional detector quivering tensely.
The Mule, for the first time in long years, had insufficient surety of his own way. Channis knew
that, though he could protect himself for the moment, it was an effort - and that the attack upon
him was none such for his opponent. In a test of endurance, Channis knew he would lose.
But it was deadly to think of that. To give away to the Mule an emotional weakness would be to
hand him a weapon. There was already that glimpse of something - a winner's something - in
the Mule's mind.
To gain time-
Why did the others delay? Was that the source of the Mule's confidence? What did his
opponent know that he didn't? The mind he watched told nothing. If only he could read ideas.
And yet-
Channis braked his own mental whirling roughly. There was only that; to gain time-
Channis said: "Since it is decided, and not denied by myself after our little duel over Pritcher,
that I am a Second Foundationer, suppose you tell me why I came to Tazenda."
"Oh, no," and the Mule laughed, with high-pitched confidence, "I am not Pritcher. I need make
no explanations to you. You had what you thought were reasons. Whatever they were, your
actions suited me, and so I inquire no further."
"Yet there must be such gaps in your conception of the story. Is Tazenda the Second
Foundation you expected to find? Pritcher spoke much of your other attempt at finding it, and of
your psychologist tool, Ebling Mis. He babbled a bit sometimes under my ... uh ... slight
encouragement. Think back on Ebling Mis, First Citizen."
"Why should I?" Confidence!
Channis felt that confidence edge out into the open, as if with the passage of time, any anxiety
the Mule might be having was increasingly vanishing.
He said, firmly restraining the rush of desperation: "You lack curiosity, then? Pritcher told me of
Mis' vast surprise at something. There was his terribly drastic urging for speed, for a rapid
warning of the Second Foundation? Why? Why? Ebling Mis died. The Second Foundation was
not warned. And yet the Second Foundation exists."
The Mule smiled in real pleasure, and with a sudden and surprising dash of cruelty that
Channis felt advance and suddenly withdraw: "But apparently the Second Foundation was
warned. Else how and why did one Bail Channis arrive on Kalgan to handle my men and to
assume the rather thankless task of outwitting me. The warning came too late, that is all."
"Then," and Channis allowed pity to drench outward from him, "you don't even know what the
Second Foundation is, or anything of the deeper meaning of all that has been going on."
To gain time!
The Mule felt the other's pity, and his eyes narrowed with instant hostility. He rubbed his nose
in his familiar four-fingered gesture, and snapped: "Amuse yourself, then. What o/The Second
Foundation?"
Channis spoke deliberately, in words rather than in emotional symbology. He said: "From what I
have heard, it was the mystery that surrounded the Second Foundation that most puzzled Mis.
Hari Seldon founded his two units so differently. The First Foundation was a splurge that in two
centuries dazzled half the Galaxy. And the Second was an abyss that was dark.
"You won't understand why that was, unless you can once again feel the intellectual
atmosphere of the days of the dying Empire. It was a time of absolutes, of the great final
generalities, at least in thought. It was a sign of decaying culture, of course, that dams had
been built against the further development of ideas. It was his revolt against these dams that
made Seldon famous. It was that one last spark of youthful creation in him that lit the Empire in
a sunset glow and dimly foreshadowed the rising sun of the Second Empire."
"Very dramatic. So what?"
"So he created his Foundations according to the laws of psychohistory, but who knew better
than he that even those laws were relative. He never created a finished product. Finished
products are for decadent minds. His was an evolving mechanism and the Second Foundation
was the instrument of that evolution. We, First Citizen of your Temporary Union of Worlds, we
are the guardians of Seldon's Plan. Only we!"
"Are you trying to talk yourself into courage," inquired the Mule, contemptuously, "or are you
trying to impress me? For the Second Foundation, Seldon's Plan, the Second Empire all
impresses me not the least, nor touches any spring of compassion, sympathy, responsibility,
nor any other source of emotional aid you may be trying to tap in me. And in any case, poor
fool, speak of the Second Foundation in the past tense, for it is destroyed."
Channis felt the emotional potential that pressed upon his mind rise in intensity as the Mule
rose from his chair and approached. Fie fought back furiously, but something crept relentlessly
on within him, battering and bending his mind back - and back.
Fie felt the wall behind him, and the Mule faced him, skinny arms akimbo, lips smiling terribly
beneath that mountain of nose.
The Mule said: "Your game is through, Channis. The game of all of you-of all the men of what
used to be the Second Foundation. Used to be! Used to be!
"What were you sitting here waiting for all this time, with your babble to Pritcher, when you
might have struck him down and taken the blaster from him without the least effort of physical
force? You were waiting for me, weren't you, waiting to greet me in a situation that would not
too arouse my suspicions.
"Too bad for you that I needed no arousal. I knew you. I knew you well, Channis of the Second
Foundation.
"But what are you waiting for now? You still throw words at me desperately, as though the mere
sound of your voice would freeze me to my seat. And all the while you speak, something in
your mind is waiting and waiting and is still waiting. But no one is coming. None of those you
expect - none of your allies. You are alone here, Channis, and you will remain alone. Do you
know why?
"It is because your Second Foundation miscalculated me to the very dregs of the end. I knew
their plan early. They thought I would follow you here and be proper meat for their cooking. You
were to be a decoy indeed - a decoy for a poor, foolish weakling mutant, so hot on the trail of
Empire that he would fall blindly into an obvious pit. But am I their prisoner?
"I wonder if it occurred to them that I’d scarcely be here without my fleet - against the artillery of
any unit of which they are entirely and pitifully helpless? Did it occur to them that I would not
pause for discussion or wait for events?
"My ships were launched against Tazenda twelve hours ago and they are quite, quite through
with their mission. Tazenda is laid in ruins; its centers of population are wiped out. There was
no resistance. The Second Foundation no longer exists, Channis - and I, the queer, ugly
weakling, am the ruler of the Galaxy."
Channis could do nothing but shake his head feebly. "No- No-"
"Yes- Yes-" mimicked the Mule. "And if you are the last one alive, and you may be, that will not
be for long either."
And then there followed a short, pregnant pause, and Channis almost howled with the sudden
pain of that tearing penetration of the innermost tissues of his mind.
The Mule drew back and muttered: "Not enough. You do not pass the test after all. Your
despair is pretense. Your fear is not the broad overwhelming that adheres to the destruction of
an ideal, but the puny seeping fear of personal destruction."
And the Mule’s weak hand seized Channis by the throat in a puny grip that Channis was
somehow unable to break.
"You are my insurance, Channis. You are my director and safeguard against any
underestimation I may make." The Mule's eyes bore down upon him. Insistent- Demanding-
"Have I calculated rightly, Channis? Have I outwitted your men of the Second Foundation?
Tazenda is destroyed, Channis, tremendously destroyed; so why is your despair pretense?
Where is the reality? I must have reality and truth! Talk, Channis talk. Have I penetrated then,
not deeply enough? Does the danger still exist? Talk, Channis. Where have I done wrong?"
Channis felt the words drag out of his mouth. They did not come willingly. He clenched his teeth
against them. He bit his tongue. He tensed every muscle of his throat.
And they came out - gasping - pulled out by force and tearing his throat and tongue and teeth
on the way.
"Truth," he squeaked, "truth-"
"Yes, truth. What is left to be done?"
"Seldon founded Second Foundation here. Here, as I said. I told no lie. The psychologists
arrived and took control of the native population."
"Of Tazenda?" The Mule plunged deeply into the flooding torture of the other's emotional
upwellings - tearing at them brutally. "It is Tazenda I have destroyed. You know what I want.
Give it to me."
"Not Tazenda. I said Second Foundationers might not be those apparently in power; Tazenda
is the figurehead-" The words were almost unrecognizable, forming themselves against every
atom of will of the Second Foundationer, "Rossem- Rossem- Rossem is the world-"
The Mule loosed his grip and Channis dropped into a huddle of pain and torture.
"And you thought to fool me?" said the Mule, softly.
"You were fooled." It was the last dying shred of resistance in Channis.
"But not long enough for you and yours. I am in communication with my Fleet. And after
Tazenda can come Rossem. But first-"
Channis felt the excruciating darkness rise against him, and the automatic lift of his arm to his
tortured eyes could not ward it off. It was a darkness that throttled, and as he felt his tom,
wounded mind reeling backwards, backwards into the everlasting black - there was that final
picture of the triumphant Mule - laughing matchstick - that long, fleshy nose quivering with
laughter.
The sound faded away. The darkness embraced him lovingly.
It ended with a cracking sensation that was like the jagged glare of a lightning flash, and
Channis came slowly to earth while sight returned painfully in blurry transmission through
tear-drenched eyes.
His head ached unbearably, and it was only with a stab of agony that he could bring up a hand
to it.
Obviously, he was alive. Softly, like feathers caught up in an eddy of air that had passed, his
thoughts steadied and drifted to rest. He felt comfort suck in - from outside. Slowly, torturedly,
he bent his neck - and relief was a sharp pang.
For the door was open; and the First Speaker stood just inside the threshold. He tried to speak,
to shout, to warn - but his tongue froze and he knew that a part of the Mule's mighty mind still
held him and clamped all speech within him.
He bent his neck once more. The Mule was still in the room. He was angry and hot-eyed. He
laughed no longer, but his teeth were bared in a ferocious smile.
Channis felt the First Speaker's mental influence moving gently over his mind with a healing
touch and then there was the numbing sensation as it came into contact with the Mule's
defense for an instant of struggle and withdrew.
The Mule said gratingly, with a fury that was grotesque in his meagre body: "Then another
comes to greet me." His agile mind reached its tendrils out of the room- out- out-
"You are alone," he said.
And the First Speaker interrupted with an acquiescence: "I am thoroughly alone. It is necessary
that I be alone, since it was I who miscalculated your future five years ago. There would be a
certain satisfaction to me in correcting that matter without aid. Unfortunately, I did not count on
the strength of your Field of Emotional Repulsion that surrounded this place. It took me long to
penetrate. I congratulate you upon the skill with which it was constructed."
"Thank you for nothing," came the hostile rejoinder. "Bandy no compliments with me. Have you
come to add your brain splinter to that of yonder cracked pillar of your realm?"
The First Speaker smiled: "Why, the man you call Bail Channis performed his mission well, the
more so since he was not your mental equal by far. I can see, of course, that you have
mistreated him, yet it may be that we may restore him fully even yet. He is a brave man, sir. He
volunteered for this mission although we were able to predict mathematically the huge chance
of damage to his mind - a more fearful alternative than that of mere physical crippling."
Channis' mind pulsed futilely with what he wanted to say and couldn't; the warning he wished to
shout and was unable to. He could only emit that continuous stream of fear- fear-
The Mule was calm. "You know, of course, of the destruction of Tazenda."
"I do. The assault by your fleet was foreseen."
Grimly: "Yes, so I suppose. But not prevented, eh?"
"No, not prevented." The First Speaker's emotional symbology was plain. It was almost a
self-horror; a complete self-disgust: "And the fault is much more mine than yours. Who could
have imagined your powers five years ago. We suspected from the start - from the moment
you captured Kalgan - that you had the powers of emotional control. That was not too
surprising, First Citizen, as I can explain to you.
"Emotional contact such as you and I possess is not a very new development. Actually it is
implicit in the human brain. Most humans can read emotion in a primitive manner by
associating it pragmatically with facial expression, tone of voice and so on. A good many
animals possess the faculty to a higher degree; they use the sense of smell to a good extent
and the emotions involved are, of course, less complex.
"Actually, humans are capable of much more, but the faculty of direct emotional contact tended
to atrophy with the development of speech a million years back. It has been the great advance
of our Second Foundation that this forgotten sense has been restored to at least some of its
potentialities.
"But we are not born with its full use. A million years of decay is a formidable obstacle, and we
must educate the sense, exercise it as we exercise our muscles. And there you have the main
difference. You were born with it.
"So much we could calculate. We could also calculate the effect of such a sense upon a person
in a world of men who did not possess it. The seeing man in the kingdom of the blind- We
calculated the extent to which a megalomania would take control of you and we thought we
were prepared. But for two factors we were not prepared.
"The first was the great extent of your sense. We can induce emotional contact only when in
eyeshot, which is why we are more helpless against physical weapons than you might think.
Sight plays such an enormous part. Not so with you. You are definitely known to have had men
under control, and, further, to have had intimate emotional contact with them when out of sight
and out of earshot. That was discovered too late.
"Secondly, we did not know of your physical shortcomings, particularly the one that seemed so
important to you, that you adopted the name of the Mule. We didn't foresee that you were not
merely a mutant, but a sterile mutant and the added psychic distortion due to your inferiority
complex passed us by. We allowed only for a megalomania - not for an intensely psychopathic
paranoia as well.
"It is myself that bears the responsibility for having missed all that, for I was the leader of the
Second Foundation when you captured Kalgan. When you destroyed the First Foundation, we
found out - but too late - and for that fault millions have died on Tazenda."
"And you will correct things now?" The Mules thin lips curled, his mind pulsing with hate: "What
will you do? Fatten me? Restore me to a masculine vigor? Take away from my past the long
childhood in an alien environment. Do you regret my sufferings? Do you regret my
unhappiness? I have no sorrow for what I did in my necessity. Let the Galaxy Protect itself as
best it can, since it stirred not a whit for my protection when I needed it."
Your emotions are, of course," said the First Speaker, "only the children of your background
and are not to be condemned - merely changed. The destruction of Tazenda was unavoidable.
The alternative would have been a much greater destruction generally throughout the Galaxy
over a period of centuries. We did our best in our limited way. We withdrew as many men from
Tazenda as we could. We decentralized the rest of the world. Unfortunately, our measures
were of necessity far from adequate. It left many millions to die - do you not regret that?"
"Not at all - any more than I regret the hundred thousand that must die on Rossem in not more
than six hours."
"On Rossem?" said the First Speaker, quickly.
Fie turned to Channis who had forced himself into a half-sitting posture, and his mind exerted
its force. Channis, felt the duel of minds strain over him, and then there was a short snapping of
the bond and the words came tumbling out of his mouth: "Sir, I have failed completely. He
forced it from me not ten minutes before your arrival. I could not resist him and I offer no
excuses. He knows Tazenda is not the Second Foundation. He knows that Rossem is."
And the bonds closed down upon him again.
The First Speaker frowned: "I see. What is it you are planning to do?"
"Do you really wonder? Do you really find it difficult to penetrate the obvious? All this time that
you have preached to me of the nature of emotional contact - all this time that you have been
throwing words such as megalomania and paranoia at me, I have been working. I have been in
contact with my Fleet and it has its orders. In six hours, unless I should for some reason
counteract my orders, they are to bombard all of Rossem except this lone village and an area
of a hundred square miles about it. They are to do a thorough job and are then to land here.
"You have six hours, and in six hours, you cannot beat down my mind, nor can you save the
rest of Rossem."
The Mule spread his hands and laughed again while the First Speaker seemed to find difficulty
in absorbing this new state of affairs.
He said: "The alternative?"
"Why should there even be an alternative? I can stand to gain no more by any alternative. Is it
the lives of those on Rossem I'm to be chary of? Perhaps if you allow my ships to land and
submit, all of you - all the men on the Second Foundation - to mental control sufficient to suit
myself, I may countermand the bombardment orders. It may be worthwhile to put so many men
of high intelligence under my control. But then again it would be a considerable effort and
perhaps not worth it after all, so I'm not particularly eager to have you agree to it. What do you
say, Second Foundationer? What weapon have you against my mind which is as strong as
yours at least and against my ships which are stronger than anything you have ever dreamed
of possessing?"
"What have I?" repeated the First Speaker, slowly: "Why nothing - except a little grain - such a
little grain of knowledge that even yet you do not possess."
"Speak quickly," laughed the Mule, "speak inventively. For squirm as you might, you won't
squirm out of this."
"Poor mutant," said the First Speaker, "I have nothing to squirm out of. Ask yourself - why was
Bail Channis sent to Kalgan as a decoy - Bail Channis, who though young and brave is almost
as much your mental inferior as is this sleeping officer of yours, this Han Pritcher. Why did not I
go, or another of our leaders, who would be more your match?"
"Perhaps," came the supremely confident reply, "you were not sufficiently foolish, since
perhaps none of you are my match."
"The true reason is more logical. You knew Channis to be a Second Foundationer. He lacked
the capacity to hide that from you. And you knew, too, that you were his superior, so you were
not afraid to play his game and follow him as he wished you to in order to outwit him later. Had I
gone to Kalgan, you would have killed me for I would have been a real danger, or had I avoided
death by concealing my identity, I would yet have failed in persuading you to follow me into
space. It was only known inferiority that lured you on. And had you remained on Kalgan, not all
the force of the Second Foundation could have harmed you, surrounded as you were by your
men, your machines, and your mental power."
"My mental power is yet with me, squirmer," said the Mule, "and my men and machines are not
far off."
"Truly so, but you are not on Kalgan. You are here in the Kingdom of Tazenda, logically
presented to you as the Second Foundation - very logically presented. It had to be so
presented, for you are a wise man, First Citizen, and would follow only logic."
"Correct, and it was a momentary victory for your side, but there was still time for me to worm
the truth from your man, Channis, and still wisdom in me to realize that such a truth might
exist."
"And on our side, oh, not-quite-sufficiently-subtle one, was the realization that you might go that
one step further and so Bail Channis was prepared for you."
"That he most certainly was not, for I stripped his brain clean as any plucked chicken. It
quivered bare and open before me and when he said Rossem was the Second Foundation, it
was basic truth for I had ground him so flat and smooth that not the smidgeon of a deceit could
have found refuge in any microscopic crevice."
"True enough. So much the better for our foresight. For I have told you already that Bail
Channis was a volunteer. Do you know what sort of a volunteer? Before he left our Foundation
for Kalgan and you, he submitted to emotional surgery of a drastic nature. Do you think it was
sufficient to deceive you? Do you think Bail Channis, mentally untouched, could possibly
deceive you? No, Bail Channis was himself deceived, of necessity and voluntarily. Down to the
inmost core of his mind, Bail Channis honestly believes that Rossem is the Second Foundation.
"And for three years now, we of the Second Foundation have built up the appearance of that
here in the Kingdom of Tazenda, in preparation and waiting for you. And we have succeeded,
have we not? You penetrated to Tazenda, and beyond that, to Rossem - but past that, you
could not go."
The Mule was upon his feet: "You dare tell me that Rossem also, is not the Second
Foundation?"
Channis, from the floor, felt his bonds burst for good, under a stream of mental force on the part
of the First Speaker and strained upright. Fie let out one long, incredulous cry: "You mean
Rossem is not the Second Foundation?"
The memories of life, the knowledge of his mind - everything - whirled mistily about him in
confusion.
The First Speaker smiled: "You see, First Citizen, Channis is as upset as you are. Of course,
Rossem is not the Second Foundation. Are we madmen then, to lead you, our greatest, most
powerful, most dangerous enemy to our own world? Oh, no!
"Let your Fleet bombard Rossem, First Citizen, if you must have it so. Let them destroy all they
can. For at most they can kill only Channis and myself - and that will leave you in a situation
improved not in the least.
"For the Second Foundation's Expedition to Rossem which has been here for three years and
has functioned, temporarily, as Elders in this village, embarked yesterday and are returning to
Kalgan. They will evade your Fleet, of course, and they will arrive in Kalgan at least a day
before you can, which is why I tell you all this. Unless I countermand my orders, when you
return, you will find a revolting Empire, a disintegrated realm, and only the men with you in your
Fleet here will be loyal to you. They will be hopelessly outnumbered. And moreover, the men of
the Second Foundation will be with your Flome Fleet and will see to it that you reconvert no
one. Your Empire is done, mutant."
Slowly, the Mule bowed his head, as anger and despair cornered his mind completely, "Yes.
Too late- Too late- Now I see it."
"Now you see it," agreed the First Speaker, "and now you don't."
In the despair of that moment, when the Mule's mind lay open, the First Speaker - ready for
that moment and pre-sure of its nature - entered quickly. It required a rather insignificant
fraction of a second to consummate the change completely.
The Mule looked up and said: "Then I shall return to Kalgan?
"Certainly. Flow do you feel?"
"Excellently well." Flis brow puckered: "Who are you?"
"Does it matter?"
"Of course not." Fie dismissed the matter, and touched Pritcher's shoulder: "Wake up, Pritcher,
we're going home."
It was two hours later that Bail Channis felt strong enough to walk by himself. Fie said: "Fie
won't ever remember?"
"Never. He retains his mental powers and his Empire - but his motivations are now entirely
different. The notion of a Second Foundation is a blank to him, and he is a man of peace. He
will be a far happier man henceforward, too, for the few years of life left him by his maladjusted
physique. And then, after he is dead Seldon's Plan will go on - somehow."
"And it is true," urged Channis, "it is true that Rossem is not the Second Foundation? I could
swear - I tell you I know it is. I am not mad."
"You are not mad, Channis, merely, as I have said, changed. Rossem is not the Second
Foundation. Come! We, too, will return home."
LAST INTERLUDE
Bail Channis sat in the small white-tiled room and allowed his mind to relax. He was content to
live in the present. There were the walls and the window and the grass outside. They had no
names. They were just things. There was a bed and a chair an books that developed
themselves idly on the screen at the foot of his bed. There was the nurse who brought him his
food.
At first he had made efforts to piece together the scraps of things he had heard. Such as those
two men talking together.
One had said: "Complete aphasia now. It’s cleaned out, and I think without damage. It will only
be necessary to return the recording of his original brain-wave makeup."
He remembered the sounds by rote, and for some reason they seemed peculiar sounds - as if
they meant something. But why bother.
Better to watch the pretty changing colors on the screen at the foot of the thing he lay on.
And then someone entered and did things to him and for a long time, he slept.
And when that had passed, the bed was suddenly a bed and he knew he was in a hospital, and
the words he remembered made sense.
He sat up: "What's happening?"
The First Speaker was beside him, "You're on the Second Foundation, and you have your mind
back - your original mind."
"Yes! Yes !" Channis came to the realization that he was himself, and there was incredible
triumph and joy in that.
"And now tell me," said the First Speaker, "do you know where the Second Foundation is now?"
And the truth came flooding down in one enormous wave and Channis did not answer. Like
Ebling Mis before him, he was conscious of only one vast, numbing surprise.
Until he finally nodded, and said: "By the Stars of the Galaxy - now, I know."
PART II
SEARCH BY THE FOUNDATION
7
Arcadia
DARELL, ARKADY novelist, born 1 1, 5, 362 F.E., died 1, 7, 443 F.E. Although primarily a writer
of fiction, Arkady Darell is best known for her biography of her grandmother, Bayta Darell.
Based on first-hand information, it has for centuries served as a primary source of information
concerning the Mule and his times. ... Like "Unkeyed Memories", her novel "Time and Time and
Over" is a stirring reflection of the brilliant Kalganian society of the early Interregnum, based, it
is said, on a visit to Kalgan in her youth....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Arcadia Darell declaimed firmly into the mouthpiece of her transcriber:
"The Future of Seldon's Plan, by A. Darell" and then thought darkly that some day when she
was a great writer, she would write all her masterpieces under the pseudonym of Arkady. Just
Arkady. No last name at all.
"A. Darell" would be just the sort of thing that she would have to put on all her themes for her
class in Composition and Rhetoric - so tasteless. All the other kids had to do it, too, except for
Olynthus Dam, because the class laughed so when he did it the first time, And "Arcadia" was a
little girls name, wished on her because her great-grandmother had been called that; her
parents just had no imagination at all.
Now that she was two days past fourteen, you'd think they'd recognize the simple fact of
adulthood and call her Arkady. Her lips tightened as she thought of her father looking up from
his book-viewer just long enough to say, "But if you're going to pretend you're nineteen,
Arcadia, what will you do when you're twenty-five and all the boys think you're thirty?"
From where she sprawled across the arms and into the hollow of her own special armchair, she
could see the mirror on her dresser. Her foot was a little in the way because her house slipper
kept twirling about her big toe, so she pulled it in and sat up with an unnatural straightness to
her neck that she felt sure, somehow, lengthened it a full two inches into slim regality.
For a moment, she considered her face thoughtfully - too fat. She opened her jaws half an inch
behind closed lips, and caught the resultant trace of unnatural gauntness at every angle. She
licked her lips with a quick touch of tongue and let them pout a bit in moist softness. Then she
let her eyelids droop in a weary, worldly way- Oh, golly if only her cheeks weren't that silly pink.
She tried putting her fingers to the outer comers of her eye and tilting the lids a bit to get that
mysterious exotic languor of the women of the inner star systems, but her hands were in the
way and she couldn't see her face very well.
Then she lifted her chin, caught herself at a half-profile, and with her eyes a little strained from
looking out the comer and her neck muscles faintly aching, she said, in a voice one octave
below its natural pitch, "Really, father, if you think it makes a particle of difference to me what
some silly old boys think you just-"
And then she remembered that she still had the transmitter open in her hand and said, drearily,
"Oh, golly," and shut it off.
The faintly violet paper with the peach margin line on the left had upon it the following:
"THE FUTURE OF SELDON'S PLAN
"Really, father, if you think it makes a particle of difference to me what some silly old boys think
you just
"Oh, golly."
She pulled the sheet out of the machine with annoyance and another clicked neatly into place.
But her face smoothed out of its vexation, nevertheless, and her wide, little mouth stretched
into a self-satisfied smile. She sniffed at the paper delicately, just right. Just that proper touch of
elegance and charm. And the penmanship was just the last word.
The machine had been delivered two days ago on her first adult birthday. She had said, "But
father, everybody - just everybody in the class who has the slightest pretensions to being
anybody has one. Nobody but some old drips would use hand machines-"
The salesman had said, "There is no other model as compact on the one hand and as
adaptable on the other. It will spell and punctuate correctly according to the sense of the
sentence. Naturally, it is a great aid to education since it encourages the user to employ careful
enunciation and breathing in order to make sure of the correct spelling, to say nothing of
demanding a proper and elegant delivery for correct punctuation."
Even then her father had tried to get one geared for type-print as if she were some dried-up,
old-maid teacher.
But when it was delivered, it was the model she wanted - obtained perhaps with a little more
wail and sniffle than quite went with the adulthood of fourteen - and copy was turned out in a
charming and entirely feminine handwriting, with the most beautifully graceful capitals anyone
ever saw.
Even the phrase, "Oh, golly." somehow breathed glamour when the Transcriber was done with
it.
But just the same she had to get it right, so she sat up straight in her chair, placed her first draft
before her in businesslike fashion, and began again, crisply and clearly; her abdomen flat, her
chest lifted, and her breathing carefully controlled. She intoned, with dramatic fervor:
The Future of Seldon's Plan.
"The Foundation's past history is, I am sure, well-known to all of us who have had the good
fortune to be educated in our planet's efficient and well-staffed school system.
(There! That would start things off right with Miss Erlking, that mean old hag.)
That past history is largely the past history of the great Plan of Hari Seldon. The two are one.
But the question in the mind of most people today is whether this Plan will continue in all its
great wisdom, or whether it will be foully destroyed, or, perhaps, has been so destroyed
already.
"To understand this, it may be best to pass quickly over some of the highlights of the Plan as it
has been revealed to humanity thus far.
(This part was easy because she had taken Modern History the semester before.)
"In the days, nearly four centuries ago, when the First Galactic Empire was decaying into the
paralysis that preceded final death, one man - the great Hari Seldon - foresaw the
approaching end. Through the science of psychohistory, the intrissacies of whose mathematics
has long since been forgotten,
(She paused in a trifle of doubt. She was sure that "intricacies" was pronounced with soft c's
but the spelling didn't look right. Oh, well, the machine couldn't very well be wrong-)
he and the men who worked with him are able to foretell the course of the great social and
economic currents sweeping the Galaxy at the time. It was possible for them to realize that, left
to itself, the Empire would break up, and that thereafter there would be at least thirty thousand
years of anarchic chaos prior to the establishment of a new Empire.
"It was too late to prevent the great Fall, but it was still possible, at least, to cut short the
intermediate period of chaos. The Plan was, therefore, evolved whereby only a single
millennium would separate the Second Empire from the First. We are completing the fourth
century of that millennium, and many generations of men have lived and died while the Plan
has continued its inexorable workings.
"Hari Seldon established two Foundations at the opposite ends of the Galaxy, in a manner and
under such circumstances as would yield the best mathematical solution for his
psychohistorical problem. In one of these, our Foundation, established here on Terminus, there
was concentrated the physical science of the Empire, and through the possession of that
science, the Foundation was able to withstand the attacks of the barbarous kingdoms which
had broken away and become independent, out at the hinge of the Empire.
"The Foundation, indeed, was able to conquer in its turn these short-lived kingdoms by means
of the leadership of a series of wise and heroic men like Salvor Hardin and Hober Mallow who
were able to interpret the Plan intelligently and to guide our land through its
(She had written "intricacies" here also, but decided not to risk it a second time.)
complications. All our planets still revere their memories although centuries have passed.
"Eventually, the Foundation established a commercial system which controlled a large portion
of the Siwennian and Anacreonian sectors of the Galaxy, and even defeated the remnants of
the old Empire under its last great general, Bel Riose. It seemed that nothing could now stop
the workings of Seldon's plan. Every crisis that Seldon had planned had come at its appropriate
time and had been solved, and with each solution the Foundation had taken another giant
stride toward Second Empire and peace.
"And then,
(Her breath came short at this point, and she hissed the word, between her teeth, but the
Transmitter simply wrote them calmly and gracefully.)
with the last remnants of the dead First Empire gone and with only ineffectual warlords ruling
over the splinters and remnants of the decayed colossus,
(She got that phrase out of a thriller on the video last week, but old Miss Erlking never listened
to anything but symphonies and lectures, so she'd never know.)
there came the Mule.
"This strange man was not allowed for in the Plan. Fie was a mutant, whose birth could not
have been predicted. Fie had strange and mysterious power of controlling and manipulating
human emotions and in this manner could bend all men to his will. With breath-taking swiftness,
he became a conqueror and Empire-builder, until, finally, he even defeated the Foundation
itself.
"Yet he never obtained universal dominion, since in his first overpowering lunge he was
stopped by the wisdom and daring of a great woman
(Now there was that old problem again. Father would insist that she never bring up the fact that
she was the grandchild of Bayta Darell. Everyone knew it and Bayta was just about the greatest
woman there ever was and she had stopped the Mule singlehanded.)
in a manner the true story of which is known in its entirety to very few.
(There! If she had to read it to the class, that last could he said in a dark voice, and someone
would be sure to ask what the true story was, and then - well, and then she couldn't help tell
the truth if they asked her, could she? In her mind, she was already wordlessly whizzing
through a hurt and eloquent explanation to a stern and questioning paternal parent.)
"After five years of restricted rule, another change took place, the reasons for which are not
known, and the Mule abandoned all plans for further conquest. His last five years were those of
an enlightened despot.
"It is said by some that the change in the Mule was brought about by the intervention of the
Second Foundation. Flowever, no man has ever discovered the exact location of this other
Foundation, nor knows its exact function, so that theory remains unproven.
"A whole generation has passed since the death of the Mule. What of the future, then, now that
he has come and gone? Fie interrupted Seldon's Plan and seemed to have burst it to
fragments, yet as soon as he died, the Foundation rose again, like a nova from the dead ashes
of a dying star.
(She had made that up herself.)
Once again, the planet Terminus houses the center of a commercial federation almost as great
and as rich as before the conquest, and even more peaceful and democratic.
"Is this planned? Is Seldon's great dream still alive, and will a Second Galactic Empire yet be
formed six hundred years from now? I, myself, believe so, because
(This was the important part. Miss Erlking always had those large, ugly red-pencil scrawls that
went: 'But this is only descriptive. What are your personal reactions? Think! Express yourself!
Penetrate your own soul!' Penetrate your own soul. A lot she knew about souls, with her lemon
face that never smiled in its life-)
never at any time has the political situation been so favorable. The old Empire is completely
dead and the period of the Mule's rule put an end to the era of warlords that preceded him.
Most of the surrounding portions of the Galaxy are civilized and peaceful.
"Moreover the internal health of the Foundation is better than ever before. The despotic times
of the pre-Conquest hereditary mayors have given way to the democratic elections of early
times. There are no longer dissident worlds of independent Traders; no longer the injustices
and dislocations that accompanied accumulations of great wealth in the hands of a few.
"There is no reason, therefore, to fear failure, unless it is true that the Second Foundation itself
presents a danger. Those who think so have no evidence to back their claim, but merely vague
fears and superstitions. I think that our confidence in ourselves, in our nation, and in Hari
Seldon's great Plan should drive from our hearts and minds all uncertainties and
(Hm-m-m. This was awfully corny, but something like this was expected at the end.)
so I say-"
That is as far as "The Future of Seldon's Plan" got, at that moment, because there was the
gentlest little tap on the window, and when Arcadia shot up to a balance on one arm of the
chair, she found herself confronted by a smiling face beyond the glass, its even symmetry of
feature interestingly accentuated by the short, vertical fine of a finger before its lips.
With the slight pause necessary to assume an attitude of bepuzzlement, Arcadia dismounted
from the armchair, walked to the couch that fronted the wide window that held the apparition
and, kneeling upon it, stared out thoughtfully.
The smile upon the man's face faded quickly. While the fingers of one hand tightened whitely
upon the sill, the other made a quick gesture. Arcadia obeyed calmly, and closed the latch that
moved the lower third of the window smoothly into its socket in the wall, allowing the warm
spring air to interfere with the conditioning within.
"You can't get in," she said, with comfortable smugness. "The windows are all screened, and
keyed only to people who belong here. If you come in, all sorts of alarms will break loose." A
pause, then she added, "You look sort of silly balancing on that ledge underneath the window.
If you're not careful, you'll fall and break your neck and a lot of valuable flowers."
"In that case," said the man at the window, who had been thinking that very thing - with a
slightly different arrangement of adjectives- "will you shut off the screen and let me in?"
"No use in doing that'" said Arcadia. "You're probably thinking of a different house, because I'm
not the kind of girl who lets strange men into their ... her bedroom this time of night." Her eyes,
as she said it, took on a heavy-lidded sultriness - or an unreasonable facsimile thereof.
All traces of humor whatever had disappeared from the young stranger's face. He muttered,
"This is Dr. Darell's house, isn't it?"
"Why should I tell you?"
"Oh, Galaxy- Good-by-"
"If you jump off, young man, I will personally give the alarm." (This was intended as a refined
and sophisticated thrust of irony, since to Arcadia's enlightened eyes, the intruder was an
obviously mature thirty, at least - quite elderly, in fact.)
Quite a pause. Then, tightly, he said, "Well, now, look here, girlie, if you don't want me to stay,
and don't want me to go, what do you want me to do?"
"You can come in, I suppose. Dr. Darell does live here. I’ll shut off the screen now."
Warily, after a searching look, the young man poked his hand through the window, then
hunched himself up and through it. He brushed at his knees with an angry, slapping gesture,
and lifted a reddened face at her.
"You're quite sure that your character and reputation won't suffer when they find me here, are
you?"
"Not as much as yours would, because just as soon as I hear footsteps outside, I'll just shout
and yell and say you forced your way in here."
"Yes?" he replied with heavy courtesy, "And how do you intend to explain the shut-off protective
screen?"
"Poof! That would be easy. There wasn't any there in the first place."
The man's eyes were wide with chagrin. "That was a bluff? How old are you, kid?"
"I consider that a very impertinent question, young man. And I am not accustomed to being
addressed as 'kid.'"
"I don't wonder. You're probably the Mule's grandmother in disguise. Do you mind if I leave now
before you arrange a lynching party with myself as star performer?"
"You had better not leave - because my father's expecting you."
The man's look became a wary one, again. An eyebrow shot up as he said, lightly, "Oh?
Anyone with your father?'
"No."
"Anyone called on him lately?'
"Only tradespeople - and you."
"Anything unusual happen at all?"
"Only you."
"Forget me, will you? No, don't forget me. Tell me, how did you know your father was expecting
me?"
"Oh, that was easy. Last week, he received a Personal Capsule, keyed to him personally, with
a self-oxidizing message, you know. He threw the capsule shell into the Trash Disinto, and
yesterday, he gave Poli - that's our maid, you see - a month's vacation so she could visit her
sister in Terminus City, and this afternoon, he made up the bed in the spare room. So I knew
he expected somebody that I wasn't supposed to know anything about. Usually, he tells me
everything."
"Really! I'm surprised he has to. I should think you'd know everything before he tells you."
'I usually do." Then she laughed. She was beginning to feel very much at ease. The visitor was
elderly, but very distinguished-looking with curly brown hair and very blue eyes. Maybe she
could meet somebody like that again, sometimes, when she was old herself.
"And just how," he asked, "did you know it was I he expected."
"Well, who else could \\ be? He was expecting somebody in so secrety a way, if you know what
I mean - and then you come gumping around trying to sneak through windows, instead of
walking through the front door, the way you would if you had any sense." She remembered a
favorite line, and used it promptly. "Men are so stupid!"
"Pretty stuck on yourself, aren't you, kid? I mean, Miss. You could be wrong, you know. What if
I told you that all this is a mystery to me and that as far as I know, your father is expecting
someone else, not me."
"Oh, I don't think so. I didn't ask you to come in, until after I saw you drop your briefcase."
"My what?"
"Your briefcase, young man. I'm not blind. You didn't drop it by accident, because you looked
down first, so as to make sure it would land right. Then you must have realized it would land
just under the hedges and wouldn't be seen, so you dropped it and didn't look down afterwards.
Now since you came to the window instead of the front door, it must mean that you were a little
afraid to trust yourself in the house before investigating the place. And after you had a little
trouble with me, you took care of your briefcase before taking care of yourself, which means
that you consider whatever your briefcase has in it to be more valuable than your own safety,
and that means that as long as you're in here and the briefcase is out there and we know that
it's out there, you're probably pretty helpless."
She paused for a much-needed breath, and the man said, grittily, "Except that I think I'll choke
you just about medium dead and get out of here, with the briefcase."
"Except, young man, that I happen to have a baseball bat under my bed, which I can reach in
two seconds from where I'm sitting, and I'm very strong for a girl."
Impasse. Finally, with a strained courtesy, the "young man" said, "Shall I introduce myself,
since we're being so chummy. I'm Pelleas Anthor. And your name?"
"I'm Area- Arkady Darell. Pleased to meet you."
"And now Arkady, would you be a good little girl and call your father?"
Arcadia bridled. "I'm not a little girl. I think you're very rude - especially when you're asking a
favor."
Pelleas Anthor sighed. "Very well. Would you be a good, kind, dear, little old lady, just chock full
of lavender, and call your father?"
"That's not what I meant either, but I’ll call him. Only not so I'll take my eyes off you , young
man." And she stamped on the floor.
There came the sound of hurrying footsteps in the hall, and the door was flung open.
"Arcadia-" There was a tiny explosion of exhaled air, and Dr. Darell said, "Who are you, sir?"
Pelleas sprang to his feet in what was quite obviously relief. "Dr. Toran Darell? I am Pelleas
Anthor. You've received word about me, I think. At least, your daughter says you have."
"My daughter says I have?" He bent a frowning glance at her which caromed harmlessly off the
wide-eyed and impenetrable web of innocence with which she met the accusation.
Dr. Darell said, finally: "I have been expecting you. Would you mind coming down with me,
please?" And he stopped as his eye caught a flicker of motion, which Arcadia caught
simultaneously.
She scrambled toward her Transcriber, but it was quite useless, since her father was standing
right next to it. He said, sweetly, "You've left it going all this time, Arcadia."
"Father," she squeaked, in real anguish, "it is very ungentlemanly to read another person's
private correspondence, especially when it's talking correspondence."
"Ah," said her father, "but 'talking correspondence' with a strange man in your bedroom! As a
father, Arcadia, I must protect you against evil."
"Oh, golly - it was nothing like that."
Pelleas laughed suddenly, "Oh, but it was, Dr. Darell. The young lady was going to accuse me
of all sorts of things, and I must insist that you read it, if only to clear my name."
Oh-" Arcadia held back her tears with an effort. Her own father didn't even trust her. And that
darned Transcriber- If that silly fool hadn't come gooping at the window, and making her forget
to turn it off. And now her father would be making long, gentle speeches about what young
ladies aren't supposed to do. There just wasn't anything they were supposed to do, it looked
like, except choke and die, maybe.
"Arcadia," said her father, gently, "it strikes me that a young lady-"
She knew it. She knew it.
"-should not be quite so impertinent to men older than she is.
"Well, what did he want to come peeping around my window for? A young lady has a right to
privacy- Now I'll have to do my whole darned composition over."
"It's not up to you to question his propriety in coming to your window. You should simply not
have let him in. You should have called me instantly - especially if you thought I was expecting
him."
She said, peevishly, "It's just as well if you didn't see him - stupid thing. Hell give the whole
thing away if he keeps on going to windows, instead of doors."
"Arcadia, nobody wants your opinion on matters you know nothing of."
"I do, too. It's the Second Foundation, that's what it is."
There was a silence. Even Arcadia felt a little nervous stirring in her abdomen.
Dr. Darell said, softly, "Where have you heard this?"
"Nowheres, but what else is there to be so secret about? And you don't have to worry that I’ll
tell anyone."
"Mr. Anthor," said Dr. Darell, "I must apologize for all this."
"Oh, that's all right," came Anthor's rather hollow response. "It's not your fault if she's sold
herself to the forces of darkness. But do you mind if I ask her a question before we go. Miss
Arcadia-"
"What do you want?"
"Why do you think it is stupid to go to windows instead of to doors?"
"Because you advertise what you're trying to hide, silly. If I have a secret, I don't put tape over
my mouth and let everyone know I have a secret. I talk just as much as usual, only about
something else. Didn't you ever read any of the sayings of Salvor Hardin? He was our first
Mayor, you know."
"Yes, I know."
"Well, he used to say that only a he that wasn't ashamed of itself could possibly succeed. He
also said that nothing had to be true, but everything had to sound true. Well, when you come in
through a window, it's a lie that's ashamed of itself and it doesn't sound true."
"Then what would you have done?"
"If I had wanted to see my father on top secret business, I would have made his acquaintance
openly and seen him about all sorts of strictly legitimate things. And then when everyone knew
all about you and connected you with my father as a matter of course, you could be as top
secret as you want and nobody would ever think of questioning it."
Anthor looked at the girl strangely, then at Dr. Darell. He said, "Let's go. I have a briefcase I
want to pick up in the garden. Wait! Just one last question. Arcadia, you don't really have a
baseball bat under your bed, do you?"
"No! I don't."
"Hah. I didn't think so."
Dr. Darell stopped at the door. "Arcadia," he said, "when you rewrite your composition on the
Seldon Plan, don't be unnecessarily mysterious about your grandmother. There is no necessity
to mention that part at all."
He and Pelleas descended the stairs in silence. Then the visitor asked in a strained voice, "Do
you mind, sir? How old is she?"
"Fourteen, day before yesterday."
"Fourteen? Great Galaxy- Tell me, has she ever said she expects to marry some day?"
"No, she hasn't. Not to me."
Well, if she ever does, shoot him. The one she's going to marry, I mean." He stared earnestly
into the older man's eyes. "I'm serious. Life could hold no greater horror than living with what
shell be like when she's twenty. I don't mean to offend you, of course."
"You don't offend me. I think I know what you mean."
Upstairs, the object of their tender analyses faced the Transcriber with revolted weariness and
said, dully: "Thefutureofseldonsplan." The Transcriber with infinite aplomb, translated that into
elegantly, complicated script capitals as:
"The Future of Seldon's Plan."
8
Seldon's Plan
MATHEMATICS The synthesis of the calculus of n-variables and of n-dimensional geometry is
the basis of what Seldon once called "my little algebra of humanity"....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Consider a room!
The location of the room is not in question at the moment. It is merely sufficient to say that in
that room, more than anywhere, the Second Foundation existed.
It was a room which, through the centuries, had been the abode of pure science - yet it had
none of the gadgets with which, through millennia of association, science has come to be
considered equivalent. It was a science, instead, which dealt with mathematical concepts only,
in a manner similar to the speculation of ancient, ancient races in the primitive, prehistoric days
before technology had come to be; before Man had spread beyond a single, now-unknown
world.
For one thing, there was in that room - protected by a mental science as yet unassailable by
the combined physical might of the rest of the Galaxy - the Prime Radiant, which held in its
vitals the Seldon Plan - complete.
For another, there was a man, too, in that room - The First Speaker.
Fie was the twelfth in the line of chief guardians of the Plan, and his title bore no deeper
significance than the fact that at the gatherings of the leaders of the Second Foundation, he
spoke first.
His predecessor had beaten the Mule, but the wreckage of that gigantic struggle still littered the
path of the Plan- For twenty-five years, he, and his administration, had been trying to force a
Galaxy of stubborn and stupid human beings back to the path- It was a terrible task.
The First Speaker looked up at the opening door. Even while, in the loneliness of the room, he
considered his quarter century of effort, which now so slowly and inevitably approached its
climax; even while he had been so engaged, his mind had been considering the newcomer with
a gentle expectation. A youth, a student, one of those who might take over, eventually.
The young man stood uncertainly at the door, so that the First Speaker had to walk to him and
lead him in, with a friendly hand upon the shoulder.
The Student smiled shyly, and the First Speaker responded by saying, "First, I must tell you
why you are here."
They faced each other now, across the desk. Neither was speaking in any way that could be
recognized as such by any man in the Galaxy who was not himself a member of the Second
Foundation.
Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts
and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to
represent certain mental nuances, be developed a method of communication - but one which
in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into
gross and guttural signaling.
Down- down- the results can be followed; and all the suffering that humanity ever knew can be
traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy, until Hari Seldon, and very few
men thereafter, could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an
impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were
the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located-so that each
might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not
understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and
insecurity of that ultimate isolation - there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage
rapacity of man toward man.
Feet, for tens of thousands of years, had clogged and shuffled in the mud - and held down the
minds which, for an equal time, had been fit for the companionship of the stars.
Grimly, Man had instinctively sought to circumvent the prison bars of ordinary speech.
Semantics, symbolic logic, psychoanalysis - they had all been devices whereby speech could
either be refined or by-passed.
Psychohistory had been the development of mental science, the final mathematicization
thereof, rather, which had finally succeeded. Through the development of the mathematics
necessary to understand the facts of neural physiology and the electrochemistry of the nervous
system, which themselves had to be, had to be, traced down to nuclear forces, it first became
possible to truly develop psychology. And through the generalization of psychological
knowledge from the individual to the group, sociology was also mathematicized.
The larger groups; the billions that occupied planets; the trillions that occupied Sectors; the
quadrillions that occupied the whole Galaxy, became, not simply human beings, but gigantic
forces amenable to statistical treatment - so that to Hari Seldon, the future became clear and
inevitable, and the Plan could be set up.
The same basic developments of mental science that had brought about the development of
the Seldon Plan, thus made it also unnecessary for the First Speaker to use words in
addressing the Student.
Every reaction to a stimulus, however slight, was completely indicative of all the trifling
changes, of all the flickering currents that went on in another's mind. The First Speaker could
not sense the emotional content of the Student's instinctively, as the Mule would have been
able to do - since the Mule was a mutant with powers not ever likely to become completely
comprehensible to any ordinary man, even a Second Foundationer - rather he deduced them,
as the result of intensive training.
Since, however, it is inherently impossible in a society based on speech to indicate truly the
method of communication of Second Foundationers among themselves, the whole matter will
be hereafter ignored. The First Speaker will be represented as speaking in ordinary fashion,
and if the translation is not always entirely valid, it is at least the best that can be done under
the circumstances.
It will be pretended therefore, that the First Speaker did actually say, "First, I must tell you why
you are here," instead of smiling just so and lifting a finger exactly thus.
The First Speaker said, "You have studied mental science hard and well for most of your life.
You have absorbed all your teachers could give you. It is time for you and a few others like
yourself to begin your apprenticeship for Speakerhood."
Agitation from the other side of the desk.
"No - now you must take this phlegmatically. You had hoped you would qualify. You had feared
you would not. Actually, both hope and fear are weaknesses. You knew you would qualify and
you hesitate to admit the fact because such knowledge might stamp you as cocksure and
therefore unfit. Nonsense! The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware that he is
wise. It is part of your qualification that you knew you would qualify."
Relaxation on the other side of the desk.
"Exactly. Now you feel better and your guard is down. You are fitter to concentrate and fitter to
understand. Remember, to be truly effective, it is not necessary to hold the mind under a tight,
controlling barrier which to the intelligent probe is as informative as a naked mentality. Rather,
one should cultivate an innocence, an awareness of self, and an unself-consciousness of self
which leaves one nothing to hide. My mind is open to you. Let this be so for both of us."
He went on. "It is not an easy thing to be a Speaker. It is not an easy thing to be a
Psychohistorian in the first place; and not even the best Psychohistorian need necessarily
qualify to be a Speaker. There is a distinction here. A Speaker must not only be aware of the
mathematical intricacies of the Seldon Plan; he must have a sympathy for it and for its ends. He
must love the Plan; to him it must be life and breath. More than that it must even be as a living
friend.
"Do you know what this is?"
The First Speaker's hand hovered gently over the black, shining cube in the middle of the desk.
It was featureless.
"No, Speaker, I do not."
"You have heard of the Prime Radiant?"
"This?" -Astonishment.
"You expected something more noble and awe-inspiring? Well, that is natural. It was created in
the days of the Empire, by men of Seldon's time. For nearly four hundred years, it has served
our needs perfectly, without requiring repairs or adjustment. And fortunately so, since none of
the Second Foundation is qualified to handle it in any technical fashion." He smiled gently.
"Those of the First Foundation might be able to duplicate this, but they must never know, of
course."
He depressed a lever on his side of the desk and the room was in darkness. But only for a
moment, since with a gradually livening flush, the two long walls of the room glowed to life.
First, a pearly white, unrelieved, then a trace of faint darkness here and there, and finally, the
fine neatly printed equations in black, with an occasional red hairline that wavered through the
darker forest like a staggering rillet.
"Come, my boy, step here before the wall. You will not cast a shadow. This light does not
radiate from the Radiant in an ordinary manner. To tell you the truth, I do not know even faintly
by what medium this effect is produced, but you will not cast a shadow. I know that."
They stood together in the light. Each wall was thirty feet long, and ten high. The writing was
small and covered every inch.
"This is not the whole Plan," said the First Speaker. "To get it all upon both walls, the individual
equations would have to be reduced to microscopic size - but that is not necessary. What you
now see represents the main portions of the Plan till now. You have learned about this, have
you not?"
"Yes, Speaker, I have."
"Do you recognize any portion."
A slow silence. The student pointed a finger and as he did so, the line of equations marched
down the wall, until the single series of functions he had thought of - one could scarcely
consider the quick, generalized gesture of the finger to have been sufficiently precise - was at
eye-level.
The First Speaker laughed softly, "You will find the Prime Radiant to be attuned to your mind.
You may expect more surprises from the little gadget. What were you about to say about the
equation you have chosen?"
"It," faltered the Student, "is a Rigellian integral, using a planetary distribution of a bias
indicating the presence of two chief economic classes on the planet, or maybe a Sector, plus
an unstable emotional pattern."
"And what does it signify?"
"It represents the limit of tension, since we have here" - he pointed, and again the equations
veered - "a converging series."
"Good," said the First Speaker. "And tell me, what do you think of all this. A finished work of art,
is it not?"
"Definitely!"
"Wrong! It is not." This, with sharpness. "It is the first lesson you must unlearn. The Seldon Plan
is neither complete nor correct. Instead, it is merely the best that could be done at the time.
Over a dozen generations of men have pored over these equations, worked at them, taken
them apart to the last decimal place, and put them together again. They've done more than
that. They've watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and
equations, they've checked reality, and they have learned.
"They have learned more than Seldon ever knew, and if with the accumulated knowledge of the
centuries we could repeat Seldon's work, we could do a better job. Is that perfectly clear to
you?"
The Student appeared a little shocked.
"Before you obtain your Speakerhood," continued the First Speaker, "you yourself will have to
make an original contribution to the Plan. It is not such great blasphemy. Every red mark you
see on the wall is the contribution of a man among us who lived since Seldon. Why ... why-" Fie
looked upward, "There!"
The whole wall seemed to whirl down upon him.
"This," he said, "is mine." A fine red line encircled two forking arrows and included six square
feet of deductions along each path. Between the two were a series of equations in red.
"It does not," said the Speaker, "seem to be much. It is at a point in the Plan which we will not
reach yet for a time as long as that which has already passed. It is at the period of
coalescence, when the Second Empire that is to be is in the grip of rival personalities who will
threaten to pull it apart if the fight is too even, or clamp it into rigidity, if the fight is too uneven.
Both possibilities are considered here, followed, and the method of avoiding either indicated.
"Yet it is all a matter of probabilities and a third course can exist. It is one of comparatively low
likelihood - twelve point six four percent, to be exact - but even smaller chances have already
come to pass and the Plan is only forty percent complete. This third probability consists of a
possible compromise between two or more of the conflicting personalities being considered.
This, I showed, would first freeze the Second Empire into an unprofitable mold, and then,
eventually, inflict more damage through civil wars than would have taken place had a
compromise never been made in the first place. Fortunately, that could be prevented, too. And
that was my contribution."
"If I may interrupt, Speaker- How is a change made?"
"Through the agency of the Radiant. You will find in your own case, for instance, that your
mathematics will be checked rigorously by five different boards; and that you will be required to
defend it against a concerted and merciless attack. Two years will then pass, and your
development will be reviewed again. It has happened more than once that a seemingly perfect
piece of work has uncovered its fallacies only after an induction period of months or years.
Sometimes, the contributor himself discovers the flaw.
"If, after two years, another examination, not less detailed than the first, still passes it, and -
better still - if in the interim the young scientist has brought to light additional details, subsidiary
evidence, the contribution will be added to the Plan. It was the climax of my career; it will be the
climax of yours.
"The Prime Radiant can be adjusted to your mind, and all corrections and additions can be
made through mental rapport. There will be nothing to indicate that the correction or addition is
yours. In all the history of the Plan there has been no personalization. It is rather a creation of
all of us together. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Speaker!"
"Then, enough of that." A stride to the Prime Radiant, and the walls were blank again save for
the ordinary room-lighting region along the upper borders. "Sit down here at my desk, and let
me talk to you. It is enough for a Psychohistorian, as such, to know his Biostatistics and his
Neurochemical Electromathematics. Some know nothing else and are fit only to be statistical
technicians. But a Speaker must be able to discuss the Plan without mathematics. If not the
Plan itself, at least its philosophy and its aims.
"First of all, what is the aim of the Plan? Please tell me in your own words - and don't grope for
fine sentiment. You won't be judged on polish and suavity, I assure you."
It was the Student's first chance at more than a bisyllable, and he hesitated before plunging into
the expectant space cleared away for him. He said, diffidently: "As a result of what I have
learned, I believe that it is the intention of the Plan to establish a human civilization based on an
orientation entirely different from anything that ever before existed. An orientation which,
according to the findings of Psychohistory, could never spontaneously come into being-"
"Stop!" The First Speaker was insistent. 'You must not say 'never.' That is a lazy slurring over of
the facts. Actually, Psychohistory predicts only probabilities. A particular event may be
infinitesimally probable, but the probability is always greater than zero."
"Yes, Speaker. The orientation desired, if I may correct myself, then, is well known to possess
no significant probability of spontaneously coming to pass."
"Better. What is the orientation?"
"It is that of a civilization based on mental science. In all the known history of Mankind,
advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the
inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to chance or to the vague
gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result, no culture of
greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of
great human misery."
"And why is the orientation we speak of a nonspontaneous one?"
"Because a large minority of human beings are mentally equipped to take part in the advance
of physical science, and all receive the crude and visible benefits thereof. Only an insignificant
minority, however, are inherently able to lead Man through the greater involvements of Mental
Science; and the benefits derived therefrom, while longer lasting, are more subtle and less
apparent. Furthermore, since such an orientation would lead to the development of a
benevolent dictatorship of the mentally best - virtually a higher subdivision of Man - it would be
resented and could not be stable without the application of a force which would depress the
rest of Mankind to brute level. Such a development is repugnant to us and must be avoided."
"What, then, is the solution?"
"The solution is the Seldon Plan. Conditions have been so arranged and so maintained that in a
millennium from its beginnings - six hundred years from now, a Second Galactic Empire will
have been established in which Mankind will be ready for the leadership of Mental Science. In
that same interval, the Second Foundation in its development, will have brought forth a group of
Psychologists ready to assume leadership. Or, as I have myself often thought, the First
Foundation supplies the physical framework of a single political unit, and the Second
Foundation supplies the mental framework of a ready-made ruling class."
"I see. Fairly adequate. Do you think that any Second Empire, even if formed in the time set by
Seldon, would do as a fulfillment of his Plan?"
"No, Speaker, I do not. There are several possible Second Empires that may be formed in the
period of time stretching from nine hundred to seventeen hundred years after the inception of
the Plan, but only one of these is the Second Empire."
"And in view of all this, why is it necessary that the existence of the Second Foundation be
hidden - above all, from the First Foundation?"
The Student probed for a hidden meaning to the question and failed to find it. Fie was troubled
in his answer, "For the same reason that the details of the Plan as a whole must be hidden from
Mankind in general. The laws of Psychohistory are statistical in nature and are rendered invalid
if the actions of individual men are not random in nature. If a sizable group of human beings
learned of key details of the Plan, their actions would be governed by that knowledge and
would no longer be random in the meaning of the axioms of Psychohistory. In other words, they
would no longer be perfectly predictable. Your pardon, Speaker, but I feel that the answer is not
satisfactory."
"It is well that you do. Your answer is quite incomplete. It is the Second Foundation itself which
must be hidden, not simply the Plan. The Second Empire is not yet formed. We have still a
society which would resent a ruling class of psychologists, and which would fear its
development and fight against it. Do you understand that?"
"Yes, Speaker, I do. The point has never been stressed-"
"Don't minimize. It has never been made - in the classroom, though you should be capable of
deducing it yourself. This and many other points we will make now and in the near future during
your apprenticeship. You will see me again in a week. By that time, I would like to have
comments from you as to a certain problem which I now set before you. I don't want complete
and rigorous mathematical treatment. That would take a year for an expert, and not a week for
you. But I do want an indication as to trends and directions
"You have here a fork in the Plan at a period in time of about half a century ago. The necessary
details are included. You will note that the path followed by the assumed reality diverges from
all the plotted predictions; its probability being under one percent. You will estimate for how
long the divergence may continue before it becomes uncorrectable. Estimate also the probable
end if uncorrected, and a reasonable method of correction."
The Student flipped the Viewer at random and looked stonily at the passages presented on the
tiny, built-in screen.
Fie said: "Why this particular problem, Speaker? It obviously has significance other than purely
academic."
"Thank you, my boy. You are as quick as I had expected. The problem is not supposititious.
Nearly half a century ago, the Mule burst into Galactic history and for ten years was the largest
single fact in the universe. Fie was unprovided for; uncalculated for. Fie bent the Plan seriously,
but not fatally.
"To stop him before he did become fatal, however, we were forced to take active part against
him. We revealed our existence, and infinitely worse, a portion of our power. The First
Foundation has learned of us, and their actions are now predicated on that knowledge.
Observe in the problem presented. Here. And here.
"Naturally, you will not speak of this to anyone."
There was an appalled pause, as realization seeped into the Student. He said: "Then the
Seldon Plan has failed!"
"Not yet. It merely may have failed. The probabilities of success are still twenty-one point four
percent, as of the last assessment."
9
The Conspirators
For Dr. Darell and Pelleas Anthor, the evenings passed in friendly intercourse; the days in
pleasant unimportance. It might have been an ordinary visit. Dr. Darell introduced the young
man as a cousin from across space, and interest was dulled by the cliche.
Somehow, however, among the small talk, a name might be mentioned. There would be an
easy thoughtfulness. Dr. Darell might say, "No," or he might say, "Yes." A call on the open
Communi-wave issued a casual invitation, "Want you to meet my cousin."
And Arcadia's preparations proceeded in their own manner. In fact, her actions might be
considered the least straightforward of all.
For instance, she induced Olynthus Dam at school to donate to her a home-built, self-contained
sound-receiver by methods which indicated a future for her that promised peril to all males with
whom she might come into contact. To avoid details, she merely exhibited such an interest in
Olynthus' self-publicized hobby - he had a home workshop-combined with such a
well-modulated transfer of this interest to Olynthus' own pudgy features, that the unfortunate
youth found himself: 1 ) discoursing at great and animated length upon the principles of the
hyperwave motor; 2) becoming dizzyingly aware of the great, absorbed eyes that rested so
lightly upon his; and 3) forcing into her willing hands his own greatest creation, the aforesaid
sound-receiver.
Arcadia cultivated Olynthus in diminishing degree thereafter for just long enough to remove all
suspicion that the sound-receiver had been the cause of the friendship. For months afterwards,
Olynthus felt the memory of that short period in his life over and over again with the tendrils of
his mind, until finally, for lack of further addition, he gave up and let it slip away.
When the seventh evening came, and five men sat in the Darell living room with food within and
tobacco without, Arcadia's desk upstairs was occupied by this quite unrecognizable
home-product of Olynthus' ingenuity.
Five men then. Dr. Darell, of course, with graying hair and meticulous clothing, looking
somewhat older than his forty-two years. Pelleas Author, serious and quick-eyed at the moment
looking young and unsure of himself. And the three new men: Jole Turbor, visicastor, bulky and
plump-lipped; Dr. Elvett Semic, professor-emeritus of physics at the University, scrawny and
wrinkled, his clothes only half-filled; Homir Munn, librarian, lanky and terribly ill-at-ease.
Dr. Darell spoke easily, in a normal, matter-of-fact tone: "This gathering has been arranged,
gentlemen, for a trifle more than merely social reasons. You may have guessed this. Since you
have been deliberately chosen because of your backgrounds, you may also guess the danger
involved. I won't minimize it, but I will point out that we are all condemned men, in any case.
"You will notice that none of you have been invited with any attempt at secrecy. None of you
have been asked to come here unseen. The windows are not adjusted to non-insight. No
screen of any sort is about the room. We have only to attract the attention of the enemy to be
ruined; and the best way to attract that attention is to assume a false and theatrical secrecy.
(Hah, thought Arcadia, bending over the voices coming - a bit screechily - out of the little box.)
"Do you understand that?"
Elvett Semic twitched his lower lip and bared his teeth in the screwup, wrinkled gesture that
preceded his every sentence. "Oh, get on with it. Tell us about the youngster."
Dr. Darell said, "Pelleas Anthor is his name. He was a student of my old colleague, Kleise, who
died last year. Kleise sent me his brain-pattern to the fifth sublevel, before he died, which
pattern has been now checked against that of the man before you. You know, of course, that a
brain-pattern cannot be duplicated that far, even by men of the Science of Psychology. If you
don't know that, you'll have to take my word for it."
Turbor said, purse-lipped, "We might as well make a beginning somewheres. We'll take your
word for it, especially since you're the greatest electroneurologist in the Galaxy now that Kleise
is dead. At least, that is the way I've described you in my visicast comment, and I even believe
it myself. How old are you, Anthor?"
"Twenty-nine, Mr. Turbor."
"Hm-m-m. And are you an electroneurologist, too? A great one?"
"Just a student of the science. But I work hard, and I've had the benefit of Kleise's training."
Munn broke in. He had a slight stammer at periods of tension. "I ... I wish you'd g ... get started.
I think everyone's t ... talking too much."
Dr. Darell lifted an eyebrow in Munn's direction, you're right, Homir. Take over, Pelleas."
"Not for a while," said Pelleas Anthor, slowly, "because before we can get started - although I
appreciate Mr. Munn's sentiment - I must request brain-wave data."
Darell frowned. "What is this, Anthor? What brain-wave data do you refer to?"
"The patterns of all of you. You have taken mine, Dr. Darell. I must take yours and those of the
rest of you. And I must take the measurements myself."
Turbor said, "There's no reason for him to trust us, Darell. The young man is within his rights."
"Thank you," said Anthor. "If you’ll lead the way to your laboratory then, Dr. Darell, well
proceed. I took the liberty this morning of checking your apparatus."
The science of electroencephalography was at once new and old. It was old in the sense that
the knowledge of the microcurrents generated by nerve cells of living beings belonged to that
immense category of human knowledge whose origin was completely lost It was knowledge
that stretched back as far as the earliest remnants of human history—
And yet it was new, too. The fact of the existence of microcurrents slumbered through the tens
of thousands of years of Galactic Empire as one of those vivid and whimsical, but quite
useless, items of human knowledge. Some had attempted to form classifications of waves into
waking and sleeping, calm and excited, well and ill - but even the broadest conceptions had
had their hordes of vitiating exceptions.
Others had tried to show the existence of brain-wave groups, analogous to the well-known
blood groups, and to show that external environment was the defining factor. These were the
race-minded people who claimed that Man could be divided into subspecies. But such a
philosophy could make no headway against the overwhelming ecumenical drive involved in the
fact of Galactic Empire - one political unit covering twenty million stellar systems, involving all
of Man from the central world of Trantor - now a gorgeous and impossible memory of the great
past - to the loneliest asteroid on the periphery.
And then again, in a society given over, as that of the First Empire was, to the physical
sciences and inanimate technology, there was a vague but mighty sociological push away from
the study of the mind. It was less respectable because less immediately useful; and it was
poorly financed since it was less profitable.
After the disintegration of the First Empire, there came the fragmentation of organized science,
back, back - past even the fundamentals of atomic power into the chemical power of coal and
oil. The one exception to this, of course, was the First Foundation where the spark of science,
revitalized and grown more intense was maintained and fed to flame. Yet there, too, it was the
physical that ruled, and the brain, except for surgery, was neglected ground.
Hari Seldon was the first to express what afterwards came to be accepted as truth.
"Neural microcurrents," he once said, "carry within them the spark of every varying impulse and
response, conscious and unconscious. The brain-waves recorded on neatly squared paper in
trembling peaks and troughs are the mirrors of the combined thought-pulses of billions of cells.
Theoretically, analysis should reveal the thoughts and emotions of the subject, to the last and
least. Differences should be detected that are due not only to gross physical defects, inherited
or acquired, but also to shifting states of emotion, to advancing education and experience, even
to something as subtle as a change in the subject's philosophy of life."
But even Seldon could approach no further than speculation.
And now for fifty years, the men of the First Foundation had been tearing at that incredibly vast
and complicated storehouse of new knowledge. The approach, naturally, was made through
new techniques - as, for example, the use of electrodes at skull sutures by a newly-developed
means which enabled contact to be made directly with the gray cells, without even the
necessity of shaving a patch of skull. And then there was a recording device which
automatically recorded the brain-wave data as an overall total, and as separate functions of six
independent variables.
What was most significant, perhaps, was the growing respect in which encephalography and
the encephalographer was held. Kleise, the greatest of them, sat at scientific conventions on an
equal basis with the physicist. Dr. Darell, though no longer active in the science, was known for
his brilliant advances in encephalographic analysis almost as much as for the fact that he was
the son of Bayta Darell, the great heroine of the past generation.
And so now, Dr. Darell sat in his own chair, with the delicate touch of the feathery electrodes
scarcely hinting at pressure upon his skull, while the vacuum-incased needles wavered to and
fro. His back was to the recorder - otherwise, as was well known, the sight of the moving
curves induced an unconscious effort to control them, with noticeable results - but he knew that
the central dial was expressing the strongly rhythmic and little-varying Sigma curve, which was
to be expected of his own powerful and disciplined mind. It would be strengthened and purified
in the subsidiary dial dealing with the Cerebellar wave. There would be the sharp,
near-discontinuous leaps from the frontal lobe, and the subdued shakiness from the subsurface
regions with its narrow range of frequencies-
He knew his own brain-wave pattern much as an artist might be perfectly aware of the color of
his eyes.
Pelleas Anthor made no comment when Darell rose from the reclining chair. The young man
abstracted the seven recordings, glanced at them with the quick, all-embracing eyes of one
who knows exactly what tiny facet of near-nothingness is being looked for.
"If you don't mind, Dr. Semic."
Semic's age-yellowed face was serious. Electroencephalography was a science of his old age
of which he knew little; an upstart that he faintly resented. He knew that he was old and that his
wave-pattern would show it. The wrinkles on his face showed it, the stoop in his walk, the
shaking of his hand - but they spoke only of his body. The brain-wave patterns might show that
his mind was old, too. An embarrassing and unwarranted invasion of a man's last protecting
stronghold, his own mind.
The electrodes were adjusted. The process did not hurt, of course, from beginning to end.
There was just that tiny tingle, far below the threshold of sensation.
And then came Turbor, who sat quietly and unemotionally through the fifteen minute process,
and Munn, who jerked at the first touch of the electrodes and then spent the session rolling his
eyes as though he wished he could turn them backwards and watch through a hole in his
occiput.
"And now-" said Darell, when all was done.
"And now," said Anthor, apologetically, "there is one more person in the house."
Darell, frowning, said: "My daughter?"
'Yes. I suggested that she stay home tonight, if you'll remember."
"For encephalographical analysis? What in the Galaxy for?"
"I cannot proceed without it."
Darell shrugged and climbed the stairs. Arcadia, amply warned, had the sound-receiver off
when he entered; then followed him down with mild obedience. It was the first time in her life -
except for the taking of her basic mind pattern as an infant, for identification and registration
purposes - that she found herself under the electrodes.
"May I see," she asked, when it was over, holding out her hand.
Dr. Darell said, "You would not understand, Arcadia. Isn't it time for you to go to bed?"
"Yes, father," she said, demurely. "Good night, all."
She ran up the stairs and plumped into bed with a minimum of basic preparation. With
Olynthus' sound-receiver propped beside her pillow, she felt like a character out of a book-film,
and hugged every moment of it close to her chest in an ecstasy of "Spy-stuff."
The first words she heard were Anthor's and they were: "The analyses, gentlemen, are all
satisfactory. The child's as well."
Child, she thought disgustedly, and bristled at Anthor in the darkness.
Anthor had opened his briefcase now, and out of it, he took several dozen brain-wave records.
They were not originals. Nor had the briefcase been fitted with an ordinary lock. Had the key
been held in any hand other than his own, the contents thereof would have silently and instantly
oxidized to an indecipherable ash. Once removed from the briefcase, the records did so
anyway after half an hour.
But during their short lifetime, Anthor spoke quickly. "I have the records here of several minor
government officials at Anacreon. This is a psychologist at Locris University; this an industrialist
at Siwenna. The rest are as you see."
They crowded closely. To all but Darell, they were so many quivers on parchment. To Darell,
they shouted with a million tongues.
Anthor pointed lightly, "I call your attention, Dr. Darell, to the plateau region among the
secondary Tauian waves in the frontal lobe, which is what all these records have in common.
Would you use my Analytical Rule, sir, to check my statement?"
The Analytical Rule might be considered a distant relation - as a skyscraper is to a shack - of
that kindergarten toy, the logarithmic Slide Rule. Darell used it with the wristflip of long practice.
He made freehand drawings of the result and, as Anthor stated, there were featureless
plateaus in frontal lobe regions where strong swings should have been expected.
"How would you interpret that, Dr. Darell?" asked Anthor.
"I'm not sure. Offhand, I don't see how it's possible. Even in cases of amnesia, there is
suppression, but not removal. Drastic brain surgery, perhaps?"
"Oh, something's been cut out," cried Anthor, impatiently, "yes! Not in the physical sense,
however. You know, the Mule could have done just that. He could have suppressed completely
all capacity for a certain emotion or attitude of mind, and leave nothing but just such a flatness.
Or else-"
"Or else the Second Foundation could have done it. Is that it?" asked Turbor, with a slow smile.
There was no real need to answer that thoroughly rhetorical question.
"What made you suspicious, Mr. Anthor?" asked Munn.
"It wasn't I. It was Dr. Kleise. He collected brain-wave patterns much as the Planetary Police
do, but along different lines. He specialized in intellectuals, government officials and business
leaders. You see, it's quite obvious that if the Second Foundation is directing the historical
course of the Galaxy - of us - that they must do it subtly and in as minimal a fashion as
possible. If they work through minds, as they must, it is the minds of people with influence;
culturally, industrially, or politically. And with those he concerned himself."
"Yes," objected Munn, "but is there corroboration? How do these people act - I mean the ones
with the plateau. Maybe it's all a perfectly normal phenomenon." He looked hopelessly at the
others out of his, somehow, childlike blue eyes, but met no encouraging return.
"I leave that to Dr. Darell," said Anthor. "Ask him how many times he's seen this phenomenon
in his general studies, or in reported cases in the literature over the past generation. Then ask
him the chances of it being discovered in almost one out of every thousand cases among the
categories Dr. Kleise studied."
"I suppose that there is no doubt," said Darell, thoughtfully, "that these are artificial mentalities.
They have been tampered with. In a way, I have suspected this-"
"I know that, Dr. Darell," said Author. "I also know you once worked with Dr. Kleise. I would like
to know why you stopped."
There wasn't actually hostility in his question. Perhaps nothing more than caution; but, at any
rate, it resulted in a long pause. Darell looked from one to another of his guests, then said
brusquely, "Because there was no point to Kleise's battle. He was competing with an adversary
too strong for him. He was detecting what we - he and I - knew he would detect - that we were
not our own masters. And I didn't want to know! I had my self-respect. I liked to think that our
Foundation was captain of its collective soul; that our forefathers had not quite fought and died
for nothing. I thought it would be most simple to turn my face away as long as I was not quite
sure. I didn't need my position since the Government pension awarded to my mother's family in
perpetuity would take care of my uncomplicated needs. My home laboratory would suffice to
keep boredom away, and life would some day end- Then Kleise died-"
Semic showed his teeth and said: "This fellow Kleise; I don't know him. How did he die?"
Anthor cut in: "He died. He thought he would. He told me half a year before that he was getting
too close-"
"Now we're too c ... close, too, aren't we?" suggested Munn, dry-mouthed, as his Adam's apple
jiggled.
"Yes," said Anthor, flatly, "but we were, anyway - all of us. It's why you've all been chosen. I'm
Kleise's student. Dr. Darell was his colleague. Jole Turbor has been denouncing our blind faith
in the saving hand of the Second Foundation on the air, until the government shut him off -
through the agency, I might mention, of a powerful financier whose brain shows what Kleise
used to call the Tamper Plateau. Homir Munn has the largest home collection of Muliana - if I
may use the phrase to signify collected data concerning the Mule - in existence, and has
published some papers containing speculation on the nature and function of the Second
Foundation. Dr. Semic has contributed as much as anyone to the mathematics of
encephalographic analysis, though I don't believe he realized that his mathematics could be so
applied."
Semic opened his eyes wide and chuckled gaspingly, "No, young fellow. I was analyzing
intranuclear motions - the n-body problem, you know. I'm lost in encephalography."
"Then we know where we stand. The government can, of course, do nothing about the matter.
Whether the mayor or anyone in his administration is aware of the seriousness of the situation,
I don't know. But this I do know - we five have nothing to lose and stand to gain much. With
every increase in our knowledge, we can widen ourselves in safe directions. We are but a
beginning, you understand."
"Flow widespread," put in Turbor, "is this Second Foundation infiltration?"
"I don't know. There's a flat answer. All the infiltrations we have discovered were on the outer
fringes of the nation. The capital world may yet be clean, though even that is not certain - else I
would not have tested you. You were particularly suspicious, Dr. Darell, since you abandoned
research with Kleise. Kleise never forgave you, you know. I thought that perhaps the Second
Foundation had corrupted you, but Kleise always insisted that you were a coward. You'll forgive
me, Dr. Darell, if I explain this to make my own position clear. I, personally, think I understand
your attitude, and, if it was cowardice, I consider it venial."
Darell drew a breath before replying. "I ran away! Call it what you wish. I tried to maintain our
friendship, however, yet he never wrote nor called me until the day he sent me your brainwave
data, and that was scarcely a week before he died-"
"If you don't mind," interrupted Flomir Munn, with a flash of nervous eloquence, "I d ... don't see
what you think you're doing. We're a p ... poor bunch of conspirators, if we're just going to talk
and talk and t ... talk. And I don't see what else we can do, anyway. This is v ... very childish. B
... brain-waves and mumbo jumbo and all that. Is there just one thing you intend to do?'
Pelleas Author's eyes were bright, "Yes, there is. We need more information on the Second
Foundation. It's the prime necessity. The Mule spent the first five years of his rule in just that
quest for information and failed - or so we have all been led to believe. But then he stopped
looking. Why? Because he failed? Or because he succeeded?"
"M ... more talk," said Munn, bitterly. "Flow are we ever to know?"
"If you'll listen to me- The Mule's capital was on Kalgan. Kalgan was not part of the
Foundation's commercial sphere of influence before the Mule and it is not part of it now. Kalgan
is ruled, at the moment, by the man, Stettin, unless there's another palace revolution by
tomorrow. Stettin calls himself First Citizen and considers himself the successor of the Mule. If
there is any tradition in that world, it rests with the super-humanity and greatness of the Mule -
a tradition almost superstitious in intensity. As a result, the Mule's old palace is maintained as a
shrine. No unauthorized person may enter; nothing within has ever been touched."
"Well?"
"Well, why is that so? At times like these, nothing happens without a reason. What if it is not
superstition only that makes the Mule's palace inviolate? What if the Second Foundation has so
arranged matters? In short what if the results of the Mule's five-year search are within-"
"Oh, p ... poppycock."
"Why not?" demanded Anthor. "Throughout its history the Second Foundation has hidden itself
and interfered in Galactic affairs in minimal fashion only. I know that to us it would seem more
logical to destroy the Palace or, at the least, to remove the data. But you must consider the
psychology of these master psychologists. They are Seldons; they are Mules and they work by
indirection, through the mind. They would never destroy or remove when they could achieve
their ends by creating a state of mind. Eh?"
No immediate answer, and Anthor continued, "And you, Munn, are just the one to get the
information we need."
"I?" It was an astounded yell. Munn looked from one to the other rapidly, "I can't do such a
thing. I'm no man of action; no hero of any teleview. I'm a librarian. If I can help you that way, all
right, and I'll risk the Second Foundation, but I'm not going out into space on any qu ... quixotic
thing like that."
"Now, look," said Anthor, patiently, "Dr. Darell and I have both agreed that you're the man. It's
the only way to do it naturally. You say you're a librarian. Fine! What is your main field of
interest? Muliana! You already have the greatest collection of material on the Mule in the
Galaxy. It is natural for you to want more; more natural for you than for anyone else. You could
request entrance to the Kalgan Palace without arousing suspicion of ulterior motives. You might
be refused but you would not be suspected. What's more, you have a one-man cruiser. You're
known to have visited foreign planets during your annual vacation. You've even been on Kalgan
before. Don't you understand that you need only act as you always have?"
"But I can't just say, 'W ... won't you kindly let me in to your most sacred shrine, M ... Mr. First
Citizen?’"
"Why not?"
"Because, by the Galaxy, he won't let me!"
"All right, then. So he won't Then you'll come home and we’ll think of something else."
Munn looked about in helpless rebellion. Fie felt himself being talked into something he hated.
No one offered to help him extricate himself.
So in the end two decisions were made in Dr. Darell's house. The first was a reluctant one of
agreement on the part of Munn to take off into space as soon as his summer vacation began.
The other was a highly unauthorized decision on the part of a thoroughly unofficial member of
the gathering, made as she clicked off a sound-receiver and composed herself for a belated
sleep. This second decision does not concern us just yet.
10
Approaching Crisis
A week had passed on the Second Foundation, and the First Speaker was smiling once again
upon the Student.
"You must have brought me interesting results, or you would not be so filled with anger."
The Student put his hand upon the sheaf of calculating paper he had brought with him and
said, "Are you sure that the problem is a factual one?"
"The premises are true. I have distorted nothing."
"Then I must accept the results, and I do not want to."
"Naturally. But what have your wants to do with it? Well, tell me what disturbs you so. No, no,
put your derivations to one side. I will subject them to analysis afterward. Meanwhile, talkto
me. Let me judge your understanding."
"Well, then, Speaker- It becomes very apparent that a gross overall change in the basic
psychology of the First Foundation has taken place. As long as they knew of the existence of a
Seldon Plan, without knowing any of the details thereof, they were confident but uncertain.
They knew they would succeed, but they didn't know when or how. There was, therefore, a
continuous atmosphere of tension and strain - which was what Seldon desired. The First
Foundation, in other words, could be counted upon to work at maximum potential."
"A doubtful metaphor," said the First Speaker, "but I understand you."
"But now, Speaker, they know of the existence of a Second Foundation in what amounts to
detail, rather merely than as an ancient and vague statement of Seldon's. They have an inkling
as to its function as the guardian of the Plan. They know that an agency exists which watches
their every step and will not let them fall. So they abandon their purposeful stride and allow
themselves to be carried upon a litter. Another metaphor, I'm afraid."
"Nevertheless, go on."
"And that very abandonment of effort; that growing inertia; that lapse into softness and into a
decadent and hedonistic culture, means the ruin of the Plan. They must be self-propelled."
"Is that all?"
"No, there is more. The majority reaction is as described. But a great probability exists for a
minority reaction. Knowledge of our guardianship and our control will rouse among a few, not
complacence, but hostility. This follows from Korillov's Theorem-"
"Yes, yes. I know the theorem."
"I'm sorry, Speaker. It is difficult to avoid mathematics. In any case, the effect is that not only is
the Foundation's effort diluted, but part of it is turned against us, actively against us."
"And is that all?"
"There remains one other factor of which the probability is moderately low—"
"Very good. What is that?"
"While the energies of the First Foundation were directed only to Empire; while their only
enemies were huge and outmoded hulks that remained from the shambles of the past, they
were obviously concerned only with the physical sciences. With us forming a new, large part of
their environment, a change in view may well be imposed on them. They may try to become
psychologists-"
"That change," said the First Speaker, coolly , " has already taken place."
The Student's lips compressed themselves into a pale line. "Then all is over. It is the basic
incompatibility with the Plan. Speaker, would I have known of this if I had lived - outside?"
The First Speaker spoke seriously, "You feel humiliated, my young man, because, thinking you
understood so much so well, you suddenly find that many very apparent things were unknown
to you. Thinking you were one of the Lords of the Galaxy; you suddenly find that you stand near
to destruction. Naturally, you will resent the ivory tower in which you lived; the seclusion in
which you were educated; the theories on which you were reared.
"I once had that feeling. It is normal. Yet it was necessary that in your formative years you have
no direct contact with the Galaxy, that you remain here, where all knowledge is filtered to you,
and your mind carefully sharpened. We could have shown you this ... this part-failure of the
Plan earlier and spared you the shock now, but you would not have understood the significance
properly, as you now will. Then you find no solution at all to the problem?"
The Student shook his head and said hopelessly, "None!"
"Well, it is not surprising. Listen to me, young man. A course of action exists and has been
followed for over a decade. It is not a usual course, but one that we have been forced into
against our will. It involves low probabilities, dangerous assumptions- We have even been
forced to deal with individual reactions at times, because that was the only possible way, and
you know that Psychostatistics by its very nature has no meaning when applied to less than
planetary numbers."
"Are we succeeding?" gasped the Student.
"There's no way of telling yet. We have kept the situation stable so far - but for the first time in
the history of the Plan, it is possible for the unexpected actions of a single individual to destroy
it. We have adjusted a minimum number of outsiders to a needful state of mind; we have our
agents - but their paths are planned. They dare not improvise. That should be obvious to you.
And I will not conceal the worst - if we are discovered, here, on this world, it will not only be the
Plan that is destroyed, but ourselves, our physical selves. So you see, our solution is not very
good."
"But the little you have described does not sound like a solution at all, but like a desperate
guess."
"No. Let us say, an intelligent guess."
"When is the crisis, Speaker? When will we know whether we have succeeded or not?"
"Well within the year, no doubt."
The Student considered that, then nodded his head. He shook hands with the Speaker. "Well,
it's good to know."
He turned on his heel and left.
The first Speaker looked out silently as the window gained transparency. Past the giant
structures to the quite, crowding stars.
A year would pass quickly. Would any of them, any of Seldon's heritage, be alive at its end?
11
Stowaway
It was a little over a month before the summer could be said to have started. Started, that is, to
the extent that Homir Munn had written his final financial report of the fiscal year, seen to it that
the substitute librarian supplied by the Government was sufficiently aware of the subtleties of
the post - last year's man had been quite unsatisfactory - and arranged to have his little cruiser
the Unimara - named after a tender and mysterious episode of twenty years past - taken out of
its winter cobwebbery.
He left Terminus in a sullen distemper. No one was at the port to see him off. That would not
have been natural since no one ever had in the past. He knew very well that it was important to
have this trip in no way different from any he had made in the past, yet he felt drenched in a
vague resentment. He, Homir Munn, was risking his neck in derring-doery of the most
outrageous sort, and yet he left alone.
At least, so he thought.
And it was because he thought wrongly, that the following day was one of confusion, both on
the Unimara and in Dr. Darell's suburban home.
It hit Dr. Darell's home first, in point of time, through the medium of Poli, the maid, whose
month's vacation was now quite a thing of the past. She flew down the stairs in a flurry and
stutter.
The good doctor met her and she tried vainly to put emotion into words but ended by thrusting
a sheet of paper and a cubical object at him.
He took them unwillingly and said: "What's wrong, Poli?"
"She's gone, doctor."
"Who's gone?"
"Arcadia!"
"What do you mean, gone? Gone where? What are you talking about?"
And she stamped her foot: 'I don't know. She's gone, and there's a suitcase and some clothes
gone with her and there's that letter. Why don't you read it, instead of just standing there? Oh,
you men!"
Dr. Darell shrugged and opened the envelope. The letter was not long, and except for the
angular signature, "Arkady," was in the ornate and flowing handwriting of Arcadia's transcriber.
Dear Father:
It would have been simply too heartbreaking to say good-by to you in person. I
might have cried like a little girl and you would have been ashamed of me. So I'm
writing a letter instead to tell you how much III miss you, even while I'm having this
perfectly wonderful summer vacation with Uncle Homir. Ill take good care of myself
and it won't be long before I’m home again. Meanwhile, I'm leaving you something
that's all my own. You can have it now.
Your loving daughter,
Arkady.
He read it through several times with an expression that grew blanker each time. He said stiffly,
"Have you read this, Poli?"
Poli was instantly on the defensive. "I certainly can't be blamed for that, doctor. The envelope
has 'Poli' written on the outside, and I had no way of telling there was a letter for you on the
inside. I'm no snoop, doctor, and in the years I've been with-"
Darell held up a placating hand, "Very well, Poli. It's not important. I just wanted to make sure
you understood what had happened."
He was considering rapidly. It was no use telling her to forget the matter. With regard to the
enemy, "forget" was a meaningless word; and the advice, insofar as it made the matter more
important, would have had an opposite effect.
He said instead, "She's a queer little girl, you know. Very romantic. Ever since we arranged to
have her go off on a space trip this summer, she's been quite excited."
"And just why has no one told me about this space trip?"
"It was arranged while you were away, and we forgot It's nothing more complicated than that."
Poli's original emotions now concentrated themselves into a single, overwhelming indignation,
"Simple, is it? The poor chick has gone off with one suitcase, without a decent stitch of clothes
to her, and alone at that. How long will she be away?"
"Now I won't have you worrying about it, Poli. There will be plenty of clothes for her on the ship.
It's been all arranged. Will you tell Mr. Anthor, that I want to see him? Oh, and first - is this the
object that Arcadia has left for me?" He turned it over in his hand.
Poli tossed her head. "I'm sure I don't know. The letter was on top of it and that's every bit I can
tell you. Forget to tell me, indeed. If her mother were alive-"
Darell, waved her away. "Please call Mr. Anthor."
Anthor's viewpoint on the matter differed radically from that of Arcadia's father. He punctuated
his initial remarks with clenched fists and tom hair, and from there, passed on to bitterness.
"Great Space, what are you waiting for? What are we both waiting for? Get the spaceport on
the viewer and have them contact the Unimara."
"Softly, Pelleas, she's my daughter."
"But it's not your Galaxy."
"Now, wait. She's an intelligent girl, Pelleas, and she's thought this thing out carefully. We had
better follow her thoughts while this thing is fresh. Do you know what this thing is?"
"No. Why should it matter what it is?'
"Because it's a sound-receiver."
"That thing?"
"It's homemade, but it will work. I've tested it. Don't you see? It's her way of telling us that she's
been a party to our conversations of policy. She knows where Homir Munn is going and why.
She's decided it would be exciting to go along."
"Oh, Great Space," groaned the younger man. "Another mind for the Second Foundation to
pick."
"Except that there's no reason why the Second Foundation should, a priori, suspect a
fourteen-year-old girl of being a danger - unless we do anything to attract attention to her, such
as calling back a ship out of space for no reason other than to take her off. Do you forget with
whom we're dealing? How narrow the margin is that separates us from discovery? How
helpless we are thereafter?"
"But we can't have everything depend on an insane child."
She's not insane, and we have no choice. She need not have written the letter, but she did it to
keep us from going to the police after a lost child. Her letter suggests that we convert the entire
matter into a friendly offer on the part of Munn to take an old friend's daughter off for a short
vacation. And why not? He's been my friend for nearly twenty years. He's known her since she
was three, when I brought her back from Trantor. It's a perfectly natural thing, and, in fact,
ought to decrease suspicion. A spy does not carry a fourteen-year-old niece about with him."
"So. And what will Munn do when he finds her?"
Dr. Darell heaved his eyebrows once. "I can't say - but I presume she’ll handle him."
But the house was somehow very lonely at night and Dr. Darell found that the fate of the
Galaxy made remarkably little difference while his daughter's mad little life was in danger.
The excitement on the Unimara, if involving fewer people, was considerably more intense.
In the luggage compartment, Arcadia found herself, in the first place, aided by experience, and
in the second, hampered by the reverse.
Thus, she met the initial acceleration with equanimity and the more subtle nausea that
accompanied the inside-outness of the first jump through hyperspace with stoicism. Both had
been experienced on space hops before, and she was tensed for them. She knew also that
luggage compartments were included in the ship's ventilation-system and that they could even
be bathed in wall-light. This last, however, she excluded as being too unconscionably
unromantic. She remained in the dark, as a conspirator should, breathing very softly, and
listening to the little miscellany of noises that surrounded Homir Munn.
They were undistinguished noises, the kind made by a man alone. The shuffling of shoes, the
rustle of fabric against metal, the soughing of an upholstered chair seat retreating under weight,
the sharp click of a control unit, or the soft slap of a palm over a photoelectric cell.
Yet, eventually, it was the lack of experience that caught up with Arcadia. In the book films and
on the videos, the stowaway seemed to have such an infinite capacity for obscurity. Of course,
there was always the danger of dislodging something which would fall with a crash, or of
sneezing - in videos you were almost sure to sneeze; it was an accepted matter. She knew all
this, and was careful. There was also the realization that thirst and hunger might be
encountered. For this, she was prepared with ration cans out of the pantry. But yet things
remained that the films never mentioned, and it dawned upon Arcadia with a shock that,
despite the best intentions in the world, she could stay hidden in the closet for only a limited
time.
And on a one-man sports-cruiser, such as the Unimara, living space consisted, essentially, of a
single room, so that there wasn't even the risky possibility of sneaking out of the compartment
while Munn was engaged elsewhere.
She waited frantically for the sounds of sleep to arise. If only she knew whether he snored. At
least she knew where the bunk was and she could recognize the rolling protest of one when
she heard it. There was a long breath and then a yawn. She waited through a gathering
silence, punctuated by the bunk's soft protest against a changed position or a shifted leg.
The door of the luggage compartment opened easily at the pressure of her finger, and her
craning neck-
There was a definite human sound that broke off sharply.
Arcadia solidified. Silence! Still silence!
She tried to poke her eyes outside the door without moving her head and failed. The head
followed the eyes.
Homir Munn was awake, of course - reading in bed, bathed in the soft, unspreading bed light,
staring into the darkness with wide eyes, and groping one hand stealthily under the pillow.
Arcadia's head moved sharply back of itself. Then, the light went out entirely and Munn's voice
said with shaky sharpness, "I've got a blaster, and I'm shooting, by the Galaxy-"
And Arcadia wailed, "It's only me. Don't shoot."
Remarkable what a fragile flower romance is. A gun with a nervous operator behind it can spoil
the whole thing.
The light was back on - all over the ship - and Munn was sitting up in bed. The somewhat
grizzled hair on his thin chest and the sparse one-day growth on his chin lent him an entirely
fallacious appearance of disreputability.
Arcadia stepped out, yanking at her metallene jacket which was supposed to be guaranteed
wrinkleproof.
After a wild moment in which he almost jumped out of bed, but remembered, and instead
yanked the sheet up to his shoulders, Munn gargled, "W ... wha ... what-"
He was completely incomprehensible.
Arcadia said meekly, "Would you excuse me for a minute? I've got to wash my hands." She
knew the geography of the vessel, and slipped away quickly. When she returned, with her
courage oozing back, Homir Munn was standing before her with a faded bathrobe on the
outside and a brilliant fury on the inside.
"What the black holes of Space are you d ... doing aboard this ship? H ... how did you get on
here? What do you th ... think I'm supposed to do with you? What's going on here?"
He might have asked questions indefinitely, but Arcadia interrupted sweetly, "I just wanted to
come along, Uncle Homir."
"Why?\'m not going anywhere?"
"You're going to Kalgan for information about the Second Foundation."
And Munn let out a wild howl and collapsed completely. For one horrified moment, Arcadia
thought he would have hysterics or beat his head against the wall. He was still holding the
blaster and her stomach grew ice-cold as she watched it.
"Watch out-Take it easy-" was all she could think of to say.
But he struggled back to relative normality and threw the blaster on to the bunk with a force that
should have set it off and blown a hole through the ship's hull.
"How did you get on?" he asked slowly, as though gripping each word with his teeth very
carefully to prevent it from trembling before letting it out.
"It was easy. I just came into the hangar with my suitcase, and said, 'Mr. Munn's baggage!' and
the man in charge just waved his thumb without even looking up."
"I'll have to take you back, you know," said Homir, and there was a sudden wild glee within him
at the thought. By Space, this wasn't his fault.
"You can't," said Arcadia, calmly, "it would attract attention."
"What?"
"You know. The whole purpose of your going to Kalgan was because it was natural for you to
go and ask for permission to look into the Mule's records. And you've got to be so natural that
you're to attract no attention at all. If you go back with a girl stowaway, it might even get into the
tele-news reports."
"Where did you g ... get those notions about Kalgan? These ... uh ... childish-" He was far too
flippant for conviction, of course, even to one who knew less than did Arcadia.
"I heard," she couldn't avoid pride completely, "with a sound-recorder. I know all about it - so
you've got to let me come along."
"What about your father?" He played a quick trump. "For all he knows, you're kidnapped ...
dead."
"I left a note," she said, overtrumping, "and he probably knows he mustn't make a fuss, or
anything. You'll probably get a space-gram from him."
To Munn the only explanation was sorcery, because the receiving signal sounded wildly two
seconds after she finished.
She said: "That's my father, I bet," and it was.
The message wasn't long and it was addressed to Arcadia. It said: "Thank you for your lovely
present, which I'm sure you put to good use. Have a good time."
"You see," she said, "that's instructions."
Homir grew used to her. After a while, he was glad she was there. Eventually, he wondered
how he would have made it without her. She prattled! She was excited! Most of all, she was
completely unconcerned. She knew the Second Foundation was the enemy, yet it didn't bother
her. She knew that on Kalgan, he was to deal with a hostile officialdom, but she could hardly
wait.
Maybe it came of being fourteen.
At any rate, the week-long trip now meant conversation rather than introspection. To be sure, it
wasn't a very enlightening conversation, since it concerned, almost entirely, the girl's notions on
the subject of how best to treat the Lord of Kalgan. Amusing and nonsensical, and yet delivered
with weighty deliberation.
Homir found himself actually capable of smiling as he listened and wondered out of just which
gem of historical fiction she got her twisted notion of the great universe.
It was the evening before the last jump. Kalgan was a bright star in the scarcely-twinkling
emptiness of the outer reaches of the Galaxy. The ship's telescope made it a sparkling blob of
barely-perceptible diameter.
Arcadia sat cross-legged in the good chair. She was wearing a pair of slacks and a
none-too-roomy shirt that belonged to Homir. Her own more feminine wardrobe had been
washed and ironed for the landing.
She said, "I'm going to write historical novels, you know." She was quite happy about the trip.
Uncle Homir didn't the least mind listening to her and it made conversation so much more
pleasant when you could talk to a really intelligent person who was serious about what you
said.
She continued: "I've read books and books about all the great men of Foundation history. You
know, like Seldon, Hardin, Mallow, Devers and all the rest. I've even read most of what you've
written about the Mule, except that it isn't much fun to read those parts where the Foundation
loses. Wouldn't you rather read a history where they skipped the silly, tragic parts?"
"Yes, I would," Munn assured her, gravely. "But it wouldn't be a fair history, would it, Arkady?
You'd never get academic respect, unless you give the whole story."
"Oh, poof. Who cares about academic respect?" She found him delightful. He hadn't missed
calling her Arkady for days. "My novels are going to be interesting and are going to sell and be
famous. What's the use of writing books unless you sell them and become well-known? I don't
want just some old professors to know me. It's got to be everybody."
Her eyes darkened with pleasure at the thought and she wriggled into a more comfortable
position. "In fact, as soon as I can get father to let me, I'm going to visit Trantor, so's I can get
background material on the First Empire, you know. I was born on Trantor; did you know that?"
He did, but he said, "You were?" and put just the right amount of amazement into his voice. He
was rewarded with something between a beam and a simper.
"Uh-huh. My grandmother ... you know, Bayta Darell, you've heard of her ... was on Trantor
once with my grandfather. In fact, that's where they stopped the Mule, when all the Galaxy was
at his feet; and my father and mother went there also when they were first married. I was born
there. I even lived there till mother died, only I was just three then, and I don't remember much
about it. Were you ever on Trantor, Uncle Homir?"
"No, can't say I was." He leaned back against the cold bulkhead and listened idly. Kalgan was
very close, and he felt his uneasiness flooding back.
"Isn't it just the most romantic world? My father says that under Stannel V, it had more people
than any ten worlds nowadays. He says it was just one big world of metals - one big city - that
was the capital of all the Galaxy. He's shown me pictures that he took on Trantor. It's all in ruins
now, but it's still stupendous. I'd just love to see it again. In fact ... Homir!"
"Yes?"
"Why don't we go there, when we're finished with Kalgan?"
Some of the fright hurtled back into his face. "What? Now don't start on that. This is business,
not pleasure. Remember that."
"But it is business" she squeaked. "There might be incredible amounts of information on
Trantor, don't you think so?*
"No, I don't He scrambled to his feet "Now untangle yourself from the computer. We've got to
make the last jump, and then you turn in." One good thing about landing, anyway; he was about
fed up with trying to sleep on an overcoat on the metal floor.
The calculations were not difficult. The "Space Route Handbook" was quite explicit on the
Foundation-Kalgan route. There was the momentary twitch of the timeless passage through
hyperspace and the final light-year dropped away.
The sun of Kalgan was a sun now - large, bright, and yellow-white; invisible behind the
portholes that had automatically closed on the sun-lit side.
Kalgan was only a night's sleep away.
12
Lord
Of all the worlds of the Galaxy, Kalgan undoubtedly had the most unique history. That of the
planet Terminus, for instance, was that of an almost uninterrupted rise. That of Trantor, once
capital of the Galaxy, was that of an almost uninterrupted fall. But Kalgan-
Kalgan first gained fame as the pleasure world of the Galaxy two centuries before the birth of
Hari Seldon. It was a pleasure world in the sense that it made an industry - and an immensely
profitable one, at that - out of amusement.
And it was a stable industry. It was the most stable industry in the Galaxy. When all the Galaxy
perished as a civilization, little by little, scarcely a feather's weight of catastrophe fell upon
Kalgan. No matter how the economy and sociology of the neighboring sectors of the Galaxy
changed, there was always an elite; and it is always the characteristic of an elite that it
possesses leisure as the great reward of its elite-hood.
Kalgan was at the service, therefore, successively - and successfully - of the effete and
perfumed dandies of the Imperial Court with their sparkling and libidinous ladies; of the rough
and raucous warlords who ruled in iron the worlds they had gained in blood, with their unbridled
and lascivious wenches; of the plump and luxurious businessmen of the Foundation, with their
lush and flagitious mistresses.
It was quite undiscriminating, since they all had money. And since Kalgan serviced all and
barred none; since its commodity was in unfailing demand; since it had the wisdom to interfere
in no world's politics, to stand on no one's legitimacy, it prospered when nothing else did, and
remained fat when all grew thin.
That is, until the Mule. Then, somehow, it fell, too, before a conqueror who was impervious to
amusement, or to anything but conquest. To him all planets were alike, even Kalgan.
So for a decade, Kalgan found itself in the strange role of Galactic metropolis; mistress of the
greatest Empire since the end of the Galactic Empire itself.
And then, with the death of the Mule, as sudden as the zoom, came the drop. The Foundation
broke away. With it and after it, much of the rest of the Mule's dominions. Fifty years later there
was left only the bewildering memory of that short space of power, like an opium dream. Kalgan
never quite recovered. It could never return to the unconcerned pleasure world it had been, for
the spell of power never quite releases its bold. It lived instead under a succession of men
whom the Foundation called the Lords of Kalgan, but who styled themselves First Citizen of the
Galaxy, in imitation of the Mule's only title, and who maintained the fiction that they were
conquerors too.
The current Lord of Kalgan had held that position for five months. Fie had gained it originally by
virtue of his position at the head of the Kalganian navy, and through a lamentable lack of
caution on the part of the previous lord. Yet no one on Kalgan was quite stupid enough to go
into the question of legitimacy too long or too closely. These things happened, and are best
accepted.
Yet that sort of survival of the fittest in addition to putting a premium on bloodiness and evil,
occasionally allowed capability to come to the fore as well. Lord Stettin was competent enough
and not easy to manage.
Not easy for his eminence, the First Minister, who, with fine impartiality, had served the last lord
as well as the present; and who would, if he lived long enough, serve the next as honestly.
Nor easy for the Lady Callia, who was Stettin's more than friend, yet less than wife.
In Lord Stettin's private apartments the three were alone that evening. The First Citizen, bulky
and glistening in the admiral's uniform that he affected, scowled from out the unupholstered
chair in which he sat as stiffly as the plastic of which it was composed. His First Minister Lev
Meirus, faced him with a far-off unconcern, his long, nervous fingers stroking absently and
rhythmically the deep line that curved from hooked nose along gaunt and sunken cheek to the
point, nearly, of the gray-bearded chin. The Lady Callia disposed of herself gracefully on the
deeply furred covering of a foamite couch, her full lips trembling a bit in an unheeded pout.
"Sir," said Meirus - it was the only title adhering to a lord who was styled only First Citizen, "you
lack a certain view of the continuity of history. Your own life, with its tremendous revolutions,
leads you to think of the course of civilization as something equally amenable to sudden
change. But it is not."
The Mule showed otherwise.
"But who can follow in his footsteps. He was more than man, remember. And be, too, was not
entirely successful."
"Poochie," whimpered the Lady Callia, suddenly, and then shrank into herself at the furious
gesture from the First Citizen.
Lord Stettin said, harshly, "Do not interrupt, Callia. Meirus, I am tired of inaction. My
predecessor spent his life polishing the navy into a finely-turned instrument that has not its
equal in the Galaxy. And he died with the magnificent machine lying idle. Am I to continue that?
I, an Admiral of the Navy?
"How long before the machine rusts? At present, it is a drain on the Treasury and returns
nothing. Its officers long for dominion, its men for loot. All Kalgan desires the return of Empire
and glory. Are you capable of understanding that?"
"These are but words that you use, but I grasp your meaning. Dominion, loot, glory - pleasant
when they are obtained, but the process of obtaining them is often risky and always
unpleasant. The first fine flush may not last. And in all history, it has never been wise to attack
the Foundation. Even the Mule would have been wiser to refrain-"
There were tears in the Lady Callia's blue, empty eyes. Of late, Poochie scarcely saw her, and
now, when he had promised the evening to her, this horrible, thin, gray man, who always
looked through her rather than at her, had forced his way in. And Poochie let him. She dared
not say anything; was frightened even of the sob that forced its way out.
But Stettin was speaking now in the voice she hated, hard and Impatient. He was saying:
"You're a slave to the far past. The Foundation is greater in volume and population, but they
are loosely knit and will fall apart at a blow. What holds them together these days is merely
inertia; an inertia I am strong enough to smash. You are hypnotized by the old days when only
the Foundation had atomic power. They were able to dodge the last hammer blows of the dying
Empire and then faced only the unbrained anarchy of the warlords who would counter the
Foundation's atomic vessels only with hulks and relics.
"But the Mule, my dear Meirus, has changed that. He spread the knowledge, that the
Foundation had hoarded to itself, through half the Galaxy and the monopoly in science is gone
forever. We can match them."
"And the Second Foundation?" questioned Meirus, coolly.
"And the Second Foundation?" repeated Stettin as coolly. "Do you know its intentions? It took
ten years to stop the Mule, if, indeed, it was the factor, which some doubt. Are you unaware
that a good many of the Foundation's psychologists and sociologists are of the opinion that the
Seldon Plan has been completely disrupted since the days of the Mule? If the Plan has gone,
then a vacuum exists which I may fill as well as the next man."
"Our knowledge of these matters is not great enough to warrant the gamble."
"Our knowledge, perhaps, but we have a Foundation visitor on the planet. Did you know that? A
Homir Munn - who, I understand, has written articles on the Mule, and has expressed exactly
that opinion, that the Seldon Plan no longer exists."
The First Minister nodded, "I have heard of him, or at least of his writings. What does he
desire?"
"He asks permission to enter the Mule's palace."
"Indeed? It would be wise to refuse. It is never advisable to disturb the superstitions with which
a planet is held."
"I will consider that - and we will speak again."
Meirus bowed himself out.
Lady Callia said tearfully, "Are you angry with me, Poochie?" Stettin turned on her savagely.
"Have I not told you before never to call me by that ridiculous name in the presence of others?"
"You used to like it."
"Well, I don't any more, and it is not to happen again."
He stared at her darkly. It was a mystery to him that he tolerated her these days. She was a
soft, empty-headed thing, comfortable to the touch, with a pliable affection that was a
convenient facet to a hard life. Yet, even that affection was becoming wearisome. She dreamed
of marriage, of being First Lady.
Ridiculous!
She was all very well when he had been an admiral only - but now as First Citizen and future
conqueror, he needed more. He needed heirs who could unite his future dominions, something
the Mule had never had, which was why his Empire did not survive his strange nonhuman life.
He, Stettin, needed someone of the great historic families of the Foundation with whom he
could fuse dynasties.
He wondered testily why he did not rid himself of Callia now. It would be no trouble. She would
whine a bit- He dismissed the thought. She had her points, occasionally.
Callia was cheering up now. The influence of Graybeard was gone and her Poochie's granite
face was softening now. She lifted herself in a single, fluid motion and melted toward him.
"You're not going to scold me, are you?"
"No." He patted her absently. "Now just sit quietly for a while, will you? I want to think."
"About the man from the Foundation?"
"Yes."
"Poochie?" This was a pause.
"What?"
"Poochie, the man has a little girl with him, you said. Remember? Could I see her when she
comes? I never-'
"Now what do you think I want him to bring his brat with him for? Is my audience room to be a
grammar school? Enough of your nonsense, Callia."
"But I’ll take care of her, Poochie. You won't even have to bother with her. It's just that I hardly
ever see children, and you know how I love them."
He looked at her sardonically. She never tired of this approach. She loved children; i.e. his
children; i.e. his legitimate children; i.e. marriage. He laughed.
"This particular little piece," he said, "is a great girl of fourteen or fifteen. She's probably as tall
as you are."
Callia looked crushed. "Well, could I, anyway? She could tell me about the Foundation? I've
always wanted to go there, you know. My grandfather was a Foundation man. Won't you take
me there, sometime, Poochie?"
Stettin smiled at the thought. Perhaps he would, as conqueror. The good nature that the
thought supplied him with made itself felt in his words, "I will, I will. And you can see the girl and
talk Foundation to her all you want. But not near me, understand."
"I won't bother you, honestly. I'll have her in my own rooms." She was happy again. It was not
very often these days that she was allowed to have her way. She put her arms about his neck
and after the slightest hesitation, she felt its tendons relax and the large head come softly down
upon her shoulder.
13
Lady
Arcadia felt triumphant. How life had changed since Pelleas Anthor had stuck his silly face up
against her window - and all because she had the vision and courage to do what needed to be
done.
Here she was on Kalgan. She had been to the great Central Theater - the largest in the Galaxy
- and seen in person some of the singing stars who were famous even in the distant
Foundation. She had shopped all on her own along the Flowered Path, fashion center of the
gayest world in Space. And she had made her own selections because Homir just didn't know
anything about it at all. The saleswomen raised no objections at all to long, shiny dresses with
those vertical sweeps that made her look so tall - and Foundation money went a long, long
way. Homir had given her a ten-credit bill and when she changed it to Kalganian "Kalganids," it
made a terribly thick sheaf.
She had even had her hair redone - sort of half-short in back, with two glistening curls over
each temple. And it was treated so that it looked goldier than ever; it just shone.
But this, this was best of all. To be sure, the Palace of Lord Stettin wasn't as grand and lavish
as the theaters, or as mysterious and historical as the old palace of the Mule - of which, so far
they had only glimpsed the lonely towers in their air flight across the planet - but, imagine, a
real Lord. She was rapt in the glory of it.
And not only that. She was actually face to face with his Mistress. Arcadia capitalized the word
in her mind, because she knew the role such women had played in history; knew their glamour
and power. In fact, she had often thought of being an all-powerful and glittering creature,
herself, but somehow mistresses weren't in fashion at the Foundation just then and besides,
her father probably wouldn't let her, if it came to that.
Of course, the Lady Callia didn't quite come up to Arcadia's notion of the part. For one thing,
she was rather plump, and didn't look at all wicked and dangerous, just sort of faded and
near-sighted. Her voice was high, too, instead of throaty, and-
Callia said, "Would you like more tea, child?"
"I'll have another cup, thank you, your grace," - or was it your highness?
Arcadia continued with a connoisseur's condescension, "Those are lovely pearls you are
wearing, my lady." (On the whole, "my lady" seemed best.)
"Oh? Do you think so?" Callia seemed vaguely pleased. She removed them and let them swing
milkily to and fro. "Would you like them? You can have them, if you like."
"Oh, my- You really mean-" She found them in her hand, then, repelling them mournfully, she
said, "Father wouldn't like it."
"Fie wouldn't like the pearls? But they're quite nice pearls."
"Fie wouldn't like my taking them, I mean. You're not supposed to take expensive presents from
other people, he says."
"You aren't? But ... I mean, this was a present to me from Poo ... from the First Citizen. Was
that wrong, do you suppose?"
Arcadia reddened. "I didn't mean-"
But Callia had tired of the subject. She let the pearls slide to the ground and said, "You were
going to tell me about the Foundation. Please do so right now."
And Arcadia was suddenly at a loss. What does one say about a world dull to tears. To her, the
Foundation was a suburban town, a comfortable house, the annoying necessities of education,
the uninteresting eternities of a quiet life. She said, uncertainly, "It's just like you view in the
book-films, I suppose."
"Oh, do you view book-films? They give me such a headache when I try. But do you know I
always love video stories about your Traders - such big, savage men. It's always so exciting. Is
your friend, Mr. Munn, one of them? Fie doesn't seem nearly savage enough. Most of the
Traders had beards and big bass voices, and were so domineering with women - don't you
think so?"
Arcadia smiled, glassily. "That's just part of history, my lady. I mean, when the Foundation was
Young, the Traders were the pioneers pushing back the frontiers and bringing civilization to the
rest of the Galaxy. We learned all about that in school. But that time has passed. We don't have
Traders any more; just corporations and things."
"Really? What a shame. Then what does Mr. Munn do? I mean, if he's not a Trader."
"Uncle Homir's a librarian."
Callia put a hand to her lips and tittered. "You mean he takes care of book-films. Oh, my! It
seems like such a silly thing for a grown man to do."
"He's a very good librarian, my lady. It is an occupation that is very highly regarded at the
Foundation." She put down the little, iridescent teacup upon the milky-metaled table surface.
Her hostess was all concern. "But my dear child. I'm sure I didn't mean to offend you. He must
be a very intelligent man. I could see it in his eyes as soon as I looked at him. They were so ...
so intelligent. And he must be brave, too, to want to see the Mule's palace."
"Brave?" Arcadia's internal awareness twitched. This was what she was waiting for. Intrigue!
Intrigue! With great indifference, she asked, staring idly at her thumbtip: "Why must one be
brave to wish to see the Mule's palace?"
"Didn't you know?" Her eyes were round, and her voice sank. "There's a curse on it. When he
died, the Mule directed that no one ever enter it until the Empire of the Galaxy is established.
Nobody on Kalgan would dare even to enter the grounds."
Arcadia absorbed that. "But that's superstition-"
"Don't say that," Callia was distressed. "Poochie always says that. He says it's useful to say it
isn't though, in order to maintain his hold over the people. But I notice he's never gone in
himself. And neither did Thallos, who was First Citizen before Poochie." A thought struck her
and she was all curiosity again: "But why does Mr. Munn want to see the Palace?"
And it was here that Arcadia's careful plan could be put into action. She knew well from the
books she had read that a ruler's mistress was the real power behind the throne, that she was
the very well-spring of influence. Therefore, if Uncle Homir failed with Lord Stettin - and she
was sure he would - she must retrieve that failure with Lady Callia. To be sure, Lady Callia was
something of a puzzle. She didn't seem at all bright. But, well, all history proved-
She said, "There's a reason, my lady - but will you keep it in confidence?"
"Cross my heart," said Callia, making the appropriate gesture on the soft, billowing whiteness of
her breast.
Arcadia's thoughts kept a sentence ahead of her words. "Uncle Homir is a great authority on
the Mule, you know. He's written books and books about it, and he thinks that all of Galactic
history has been changed since the Mule conquered the Foundation."
"Oh, my."
He thinks the Seldon Plan-'
Callia clapped her hands. "I know about the Seldon Plan. The videos about the Traders were
always all about the Seldon Plan. It was supposed to arrange to have the Foundation win all
the time. Science had something to do with it, though I could never quite see how. I always get
so restless when I have to listen to explanations. But you go right ahead, my dear. It's different
when you explain. You make everything seem so clear."
Arcadia continued, "Well, don't you see then that when the Foundation was defeated by the
Mule, the Seldon Plan didn't work and it hasn't worked since. So who will form the Second
Empire?"
"The Second Empire?"
"Yes, one must be formed some day, but how? That's the problem, you see. And there's the
Second Foundation."
"The Second Foundation?" She was quite completely lost.
'Yes, they're the planners of history that are following in the footsteps of Seldon. They stopped
the Mule because he was premature, but now, they may be supporting Kalgan."
"Why?"
"Because Kalgan may now offer the best chance of being the nucleus for a new Empire."
Dimly, Lady Callia seemed to grasp that. "You mean Poochie is going to make a new Empire."
"We can't tell for sure. Uncle Homir thinks so, but hell have to see the Mule's records to find
out."
"It's all very complicated," said Lady Callia, doubtfully.
Arcadia gave up. She had done her best.
Lord Stettin was in a more-or-less savage humor. The session with the milksop from the
Foundation had been quite unrewarding. It had been worse; it had been embarrassing. To be
absolute ruler of twenty-seven worlds, master of the Galaxy's greatest military machine, owner
of the universe's most vaulting ambition - and left to argue nonsense with an antiquarian.
Damnation!
He was to violate the customs of Kalgan, was he? To allow the Mule's palace to be ransacked
so that a fool could write another book? The cause of science! The sacredness of knowledge!
Great Galaxy! Were these catchwords to be thrown in his face in all seriousness? Besides -
and his flesh prickled slightly - there was the matter of the curse. He didn't believe in it; no
intelligent man could. But if he was going to defy it, it would have to be for a better reason than
any the fool had advanced.
"What do you want?" he snapped, and Lady Callia cringed visibly in the doorway.
"Are you busy?"
"Yes. I am busy."
"But there's nobody here, Poochie. Couldn't I even speak to you for a minute?"
"Oh, Galaxy! What do you want? Now hurry."
Her words stumbled. "The little girl told me they were going into the Mule's palace. I thought we
could go with her. It must be gorgeous inside."
"She told you that, did she? Well, she isn't and we aren't. Now go tend your own business. I've
had about enough of you."
"But, Poochie, why not? Aren't you going to let them? The little girl said that you were going to
make an Empire!"
"I don't care what she said- What was that?" He strode to Callia, and caught her firmly above
the elbow, so that his fingers sank deeply into the soft flesh, "What did she tell you?"
"You're hurting me. I can't remember what she said, if you're going to look at me like that."
He released her, and she stood there for a moment, rubbing vainly at the red marks. She
whimpered, "The little girl made me promise not to tell."
"That's too bad. Tell me! Now!"
"Well, she said the Seldon Plan was changed and that there was another Foundation
somewheres that was arranging to have you make an Empire. That's all. She said Mr. Munn
was a very important scientist and that the Mule's palace would have proof of all that. That's
every bit of what she said. Are you angry?"
But Stettin did not answer. He left the room, hurriedly, with Callia's cowlike eyes staring
mournfully after him. Two orders were sent out over the official seal of the First Citizen before
the hour was up. One had the effect of sending five hundred ships of the line into space on
what were officially to be termed as "war games." The other had the effect of throwing a single
man into confusion.
Homir Munn ceased his preparations to leave when that second order reached him. It was, of
course, official permission to enter the palace of the Mule. He read and reread it with anything
but joy.
But Arcadia was delighted. She knew what had happened.
Or, at any rate, she thought she did.
14
Anxiety
Poli placed the breakfast on the table, keeping one eye on the table news-recorder which
quietly disgorged the bulletins of the day. It could be done easily enough without loss of
efficiency, this one-eye-absent business. Since all items of food were sterilely packed in
containers which served as discardable cooking units, her duties vis-a-vis breakfast consisted
of nothing more than choosing the menu, placing the items on the table, and removing the
residue thereafter.
She clacked her tongue at what she saw and moaned softly in retrospect.
"Oh, people are so wicked," she said, and Darell merely hemmed in reply.
Her voice took on the high-pitched rasp which she automatically assumed when about to bewail
the evil of the world. "Now why do these terrible Kalganese" - she accented the second
syllable and gave it a long "a" - "do like that? You'd think they'd give a body peace. But no, it's
just trouble, trouble, all the time.
"Now look at that headline: 'Mobs Riot Before Foundation Consulate.’ Oh, would I like to give
them a piece of my mind, if I could. That's the trouble with people; they just don't remember.
They just don't remember, Dr. Darell - got no memory at all. Look at the last war after the Mule
died - of course I was just a little girl then - and oh, the fuss and trouble. My own uncle was
killed, him being just in his twenties and only two years married, with a baby girl. I remember
him even yet - blond hair he had, and a dimple in his chin. I have a trimensional cube of him
somewheres-
"And now his baby girl has a son of her own in the navy and most like if anything happens-
"And we had the bombardment patrols, and all the old men taking turns in the stratospheric
defense - I could imagine what they would have been able to do if the Kalganese had come
that far. My mother used to tell us children about the food rationing and the prices and taxes. A
body could hardly make ends meet-
"You'd think if they had sense people would just never want to start it again; just have nothing
to do with it. And I suppose it's not people that do it, either; I suppose even Kalganese would
rather sit at home with their families and not go fooling around in ships and getting killed. It's
that awful man, Stettin. It's a wonder people like that are let live. He kills the old man - what's
his name - Thallos, and now he's just spoiling to be boss of everything.
"And why he wants to fight us, I don't know. He's bound to lose - like they always do. Maybe it's
all in the Plan, but sometimes I'm sure it must be a wicked plan to have so much fighting and
killing in it, though to be sure I haven't a word to say about Hari Seldon, who I'm sure knows
much more about that than I do and perhaps I'm a fool to question him. And the other
Foundation is as much to blame. They could stop Kalgan now and make everything fine. They'll
do it anyway in the end, and you'd think they'd do it before there's any damage done."
Dr. Darell looked up. "Did you say something, Poli?"
Poli's eyes opened wide, then narrowed angrily. "Nothing, doctor, nothing at all. I haven't got a
word to say. A body could as soon choke to death as say a word in this house. It's jump here,
and jump there, but just try to say a word-" and she went off simmering.
Her leaving made as little impression on Darell as did her speaking.
Kalgan! Nonsense! A merely physical enemy! Those had always been beaten!
Yet he could not divorce himself of the current foolish crisis. Seven days earlier, the mayor had
asked him to be Administrator of Research and Development. He had promised an answer
today.
Well-
He stirred uneasily. Why, himself! Yet could he refuse? It would seem strange, and he dared
not seem strange. After all, what did he care about Kalgan. To him there was only one enemy.
Always had been.
While his wife had lived, he was only too glad to shirk the task; to hide. Those long, quiet days
on Trantor, with the ruins of the past about them! The silence of a wrecked world and the
forgetfulness of it all!
But she had died. Less than five years, all told, it had been; and after that he knew that he
could live only by fighting that vague and fearful enemy that deprived him of the dignity of
manhood by controlling his destiny; that made life a miserable struggle against a foreordained
end; that made all the universe a hateful and deadly chess game.
Call it sublimation; he, himself did can it that - but the fight gave meaning to his life.
First to the University of Santanni, where he had joined Dr. Kleise. It had been five years
well-spent.
And yet Kleise was merely a gatherer of data. He could not succeed in the real task - and
when Darell had felt that as certainty, he knew it was time to leave.
Kleise may have worked in secret, yet he had to have men working for him and with him. He
had subjects whose brains he probed. He had a University that backed him. All these were
weaknesses.
Kleise could not understand that; and he, Darell, could not explain that. They parted enemies. It
was well; they had to. He had to leave in surrender - in case someone watched.
Where Kleise worked with charts; Darell worked with mathematical concepts in the recesses of
his mind. Kleise worked with many; Darell with none. Kleise in a University; Darell in the quiet
of a suburban house.
And he was almost there.
A Second Foundationer is not human as far as his cerebrum is concerned. The cleverest
physiologist, the most subtle neurochemist might detect nothing - yet the difference must be
there.
And since the difference was one of the mind, it was there that it must be detectable.
Given a man like the Mule - and there was no doubt that the Second Foundationers had the
Mule's powers, whether inborn or acquired - with the power of detecting and controlling human
emotions, deduce from that the electronic circuit required, and deduce from that the last details
of the encephalograph on which it could not help but be betrayed.
And now Kleise had returned into his life, in the person of his ardent young pupil, Anthor.
Folly! Folly! With his graphs and charts of people who had been tampered with. Fie had learned
to detect that years ago, but of what use was it. Fie wanted the arm; not the tool. Yet he had to
agree to join Anthor, since it was the quieter course.
Just as now he would become Administrator of Research and Development. It was the quieter
course! And so he remained a conspiracy within a conspiracy.
The thought of Arcadia teased him for a moment, and he shuddered away from it. Left to
himself, it would never have happened. Left to himself, no one would ever have been
endangered but himself. Left to himself-
Fle felt the anger rising-against the dead Kleise, the living Anthor, all the well-meaning fools-
Well, she could take care of herself. She was a very mature little girl.
She could take care of herself!
It was a whisper in his mind-
Yet could she?
At the moment, that Dr. Darell told himself mournfully that she could, she was sitting in the
coldly austere anteroom of the Executive Offices of the First Citizen of the Galaxy. For half an
hour she had been sitting there, her eyes sliding slowly about the walls. There had been two
armed guards at the door when she had entered with Flomir Munn. They hadn't been there the
other times.
She was alone, now, yet she sensed the unfriendliness of the very furnishings of the room. And
for the first time.
Now, why should that be?
Flomir was with Lord Stettin. Well, was that wrong?
It made her furious. In similar situations in the book-films and the videos, the hero foresaw the
conclusion, was prepared for it when it came, and she - she just sat there. Anything could
happen. Anything! And she just sat there.
Well, back again. Think it back. Maybe something would come.
For two weeks, Flomir had nearly lived inside the Mule's palace. Fie had taken her once, with
Stettin's permission. It was large and gloomily massive, shrinking from the touch of life to lie
sleeping within its ringing memories, answering the footsteps with a hollow boom or a savage
clatter. She hadn't liked it.
Better the great, gay highways of the capital city; the theaters and spectacles of a world
essentially poorer than the Foundation, yet spending more of its wealth on display.
Homir would return in the evening, awed-
"It's a dream-world for me," he would whisper. "If I could only chip the palace down stone by
stone, layer by layer of the aluminum sponge. If I could carry it back to Terminus- What a
museum it would make."
He seemed to have lost that early reluctance. He was eager, instead; glowing. Arcadia knew
that by the one sure sign; he practically never stuttered throughout that period.
One time, he said, "There are abstracts of the records of General Pritcher-"
"I know him. He was the Foundation renegade, who combed the Galaxy for the Second
Foundation, wasn't he?"
"Not exactly a renegade, Arkady. The Mule had Converted him."
"Oh, it's the same thing."
"Galaxy, that combing you speak of was a hopeless task. The original records of the Seldon
Convention that established both Foundations five hundred years ago, make only one
reference to the Second Foundation. They say if's located 'at the other end of the Galaxy at
Star's End.' That's all the Mule and Pritcher had to go on. They had no method of recognizing
the Second Foundation even if they found it. What madness!
"They have records" - he was speaking to himself, but Arcadia listened eagerly - "which must
cover nearly a thousand worlds, yet the number of worlds available for study must have been
closer to a million. And we are no better off-"
Arcadia broke in anxiously, "Shhh-h" \n a tight hiss.
Homir froze, and slowly recovered. "Let's not talk," he mumbled.
And now Homir was with Lord Stettin and Arcadia waited outside alone and felt the blood
squeezing out of her heart for no reason at all. That was more frightening than anything else.
That there seemed no reason.
On the other side of the door, Homir, too, was living in a sea of gelatin. He was fighting, with
furious intensity, to keep from stuttering and, of course, could scarcely speak two consecutive
words clearly as a result.
Lord Stettin was in full uniform, six-feet-six, large-jawed, and hard-mouthed. His balled,
arrogant fists kept a powerful time to his sentences.
"Well, you have had two weeks, and you come to me with tales of nothing. Come, sir, tell me
the worst. Is my Navy to be cut to ribbons? Am I to fight the ghosts of the Second Foundation
as well as the men of the First?"
"I ... I repeat, my lord, I am no p ... pre ... predictor. I ... I am at a complete ... loss."
"Or do you wish to go back to warn your countrymen? To deep Space with your play-acting. I
want the truth or I’ll have it out of you along with half your guts."
"I'm t ... telling only the truth, and I'll have you re ... remember, my I ... lord, that I am a citizen of
the Foundation. Y ... you cannot touch me without harvesting m ... m ... more than you count
on."
The Lord of Kalgan laughed uproariously. "A threat to frighten children. A horror with which to
beat back an idiot. Come, Mr. Munn, I have been patient with you. I have listened to you for
twenty minutes while you detailed wearisome nonsense to me which must have cost you
sleepless nights to compose. It was wasted effort. I know you are here not merely to rake
through the Mule's dead ashes and to warm over the cinders you findyou come here for more
than you have admitted. Is that not true?"
Homir Munn could no more have quenched the burning horror that grew in his eyes than, at
that moment, he could have breathed. Lord Stettin saw that, and clapped the Foundation man
upon his shoulder so that he and the chair he sat on reeled under the impact.
"Good. Now let us be frank. You are investigating the Seldon Plan. You know that it no longer
holds. You know, perhaps, that I am the inevitable winner now; I and my heirs. Well, man, what
matters it who established the Second Empire, so long as it is established. History plays no
favorites, eh? Are you afraid to tell me? You see that I know your mission."
Munn said thickly, "What is it y ... you w ... want?"
"Your presence. I would not wish the Plan spoiled through overconfidence. You understand
more of these things than I do; you can detect small flaws that I might miss. Come, you will be
rewarded in the end; you will have your fair glut of the loot. What can you expect at the
Foundation? To turn the tide of a perhaps inevitable defeat? To lengthen the war? Or is it
merely a patriotic desire to die for your country?"
"I ... I-" He finally spluttered into silence. Not a word would come.
"You will stay," said the Lord of Kalgan, confidently. "You have no choice. Wait" - an almost
forgotten afterthought - "I have information to the effect that your niece is of the family of Bayta
Darell."
Homir uttered a startled: "Yes." He could not trust himself at this point to be capable of weaving
anything but cold truth.
"It is a family of note on the Foundation?"
Homir nodded, "To whom they would certainly b ... brook no harm."
"Harm! Don't be a fool, man; I am meditating the reverse. How old is she?"
"Fourteen."
"Sol Well, not even the Second Foundation, or Hari Seldon, himself, could stop time from
passing or girls from becoming women."
With that, he turned on his heel and strode to a draped door which he threw open violently.
He thundered, "What in Space have you dragged your shivering carcass here for?"
The Lady Callia blinked at him, and said in a small voice, "I didn't know anyone was with you."
"Well, there is. I'll speak to you later of this, but now I want to see your back, and quickly."
Her footsteps were a fading scurry in the corridor.
Stettin returned, "She is a remnant of an interlude that has lasted too long. It will end soon.
Fourteen, you say?"
Homir stared at him with a brand-new horror!
Arcadia started at the noiseless opening of a door - jumping at the jangling sliver of movement
it made in the comer of her eye. The finger that crooked frantically at her met no response for
long moments, and then, as if in response to the cautions enforced by the very sight of that
white, trembling figure, she tiptoed her way across the floor.
Their footsteps were a taut whisper in the corridor. It was the Lady Callia, of course, who held
her hand so tightly that it hurt, and for some reason, she did not mind following her. Of the Lady
Callia, at least, she was not afraid.
Now, why was that?
They were in a boudoir now, all pink fluff and spun sugar. Lady Callia stood with her back
against the door.
She said, "This was our private way to me ... to my room, you know, from his office. His, you
know." And she pointed with a thumb, as though even the thought of him were grinding her soul
to death with fear.
"It's so lucky ... it’s so lucky-" Her pupils had blackened out the blue with their size.
"Can you tell me-" began Arcadia timidly.
And Callia was in frantic motion. "No, child, no. There is no time. Take off your clothes. Please.
Please. I'll get you more, and they won't recognize you."
She was in the closet, throwing useless bits of flummery in reckless heaps upon the ground,
looking madly for something a girl could wear without becoming a living invitation to dalliance.
"Here, this will do. It will have to. Do you have money? Here, take it all - and this." She was
stripping her ears and fingers. "Just go home - go home to your Foundation."
"But Homir ... my uncle." She protested vainly through the muffling folds of the sweet-smelling
and luxurious spun-metal being forced over her head.
"He won't leave. Poochie will hold him forever, but you mustn't stay. Oh, dear, don't you
understand?"
No." Arcadia forced a standstill, "I don't understand.
Lady Callia squeezed her hands tightly together. "You must go back to warn your people there
will be war. Isn't that clear?" Absolute terror seemed paradoxically to have lent a lucidity to her
thoughts and words that was entirely out of character. "Now come!"
Out another way! Past officials who stared after them, but saw no reason to stop one whom
only the Lord of Kalgan could stop with impunity. Guards clicked heels and presented arms
when they went through doors.
Arcadia breathed only on occasion through the years the trip seemed to take - yet from the first
crooking of the white finger to the time she stood at the outer gate, with people and noise and
traffic in the distance was only twenty-five minutes.
She looked back, with a sudden frightened pity. "I ... I ... don't know why you're doing this, my
lady, but thanks- What's going to happen to Uncle Homir?"
"I don't know," wailed the other. "Can't you leave? Go straight to the spaceport. Don't wait. He
may be looking for you this very minute."
And still Arcadia lingered. She would be leaving Homir; and, belatedly, now that she felt the
free air about her, she was suspicious. "But what do you care if he does?"
Lady Callia bit her lower lip and muttered, "I can't explain to a little girl like you. It would be
improper. Well, you'll be growing up and I ... I met Poochie when I was sixteen. I can't have you
about, you know." There was a half-ashamed hostility in her eyes.
The implications froze Arcadia. She whispered: "What will he do to you when he finds out?"
And she whimpered back: "I don't know," and threw her arm to her head as she left at a
half-run, back along the wide way to the mansion of the Lord of Kalgan.
But for one eternal second, Arcadia sf/7/ did not move, for in that last moment before Lady Callia
left, Arcadia had seen something. Those frightened, frantic eyes had momentarily - flashingly -
lit up with a cold amusement.
Avast, inhuman amusement.
It was much to see in such a quick flicker of a pair of eyes, but Arcadia had no doubt of what
she saw.
She was running now - running wildly - searching madly for an unoccupied public booth at
which one could press a button for public conveyance.
She was not running from Lord Stettin; not from him or from all the human hounds he could
place at her heels - not from all his twenty-seven worlds rolled into a single gigantic
phenomenon, hallooing at her shadow.
She was running from a single, frail woman who had helped her escape. From a creature who
had loaded her with money and jewels; who had risked her own life to save her. From an entity
she knew, certainly and finally, to be a woman of the Second Foundation.
An air-taxi came to a soft clicking halt in the cradle. The wind of its coming brushed against
Arcadia's face and stirred at the hair beneath the softly-furred hood Callia had given her.
"Where'll it be, lady?"
She fought desperately to low-pitch her voice to make it not that of a child. "How many
spaceports in the city?"
"Two. Which one ya want?"
"Which is closer?"
He stared at her: "Kalgan Central, lady."
"The other one, please. I’ve got the money." She had a twenty-Kalganid note in her hand. The
denomination of the note made little difference to her, but the taxi-man grinned appreciatively.
"Anything ya say, lady. Sky-line cabs take ya anywhere."
She cooled her cheek against the slightly musty upholstery. The lights of the city moved
leisurely below her.
What should she do? What should she do?
It was in that moment that she knew she was a stupid , stupid little girl, away from her father,
and frightened. Her eyes were full of tears, and deep down in her throat, there was a small,
soundless cry that hurt her insides.
She wasn't afraid that Lord Stettin would catch her. Lady Callia would see to that. Lady Callia!
Old, fat, stupid, but she held on to her lord, somehow. Oh, it was clear enough, now. Everything
was clear.
That tea with Callia at which she had been so smart. Clever little Arcadia! Something inside
Arcadia choked and hated itself. That tea had been maneuvered, and then Stettin had probably
been maneuvered so that Homir was allowed to inspect the Palace after all. She, the foolish
Callia, has wanted it so, and arranged to have smart little Arcadia supply a foolproof excuse,
one which would arouse no suspicions in the minds of the victims, and yet involve a minimum
of interference on her part.
Then why was she free? Homir was a prisoner, of course-
Unless-
Unless she went back to the Foundation as a decoy - a decoy to lead others into the hands of
...of them.
So she couldn't return to the Foundation-
"Spaceport, lady." The air-taxi had come to a halt. Strange! She hadn't even noticed.
What a dream-world it was.
"Thanks," she pushed the bill at him without seeing anything and was stumbling out the door,
then running across the springy pavement.
Lights. Unconcerned men and women. Large gleaming bulletin boards, with the moving figures
that followed every single spaceship that arrived and departed.
Where was she going? She didn't care. She only knew that she wasn't going to the Foundation!
Anywhere else at all would suit.
Oh, thank Seldon, for that forgetful moment - that last split-second when Callia wearied of her
act because she had to do only with a child and had let her amusement spring through.
And then something else occurred to Arcadia, something that had been stirring and moving at
the base of her brain ever since the flight began - something that forever killed the fourteen in
her.
And she knew that she must escape.
That above all. Though they located every conspirator on the Foundation; though they caught
her own father; she could not dared not, risk a warning. She could not risk her own life - not in
the slightest - for the entire realm of Terminus. She was the most important person in the
Galaxy. She was the only important person in the Galaxy.
She knew that even as she stood before the ticket-machine and wondered where to go.
Because in all the Galaxy, she and she alone, except for they, themselves, knew the location of
the Second Foundation.
15
Through the Grid
TRANTOR By the middle of the Interregnum, Trantor was a shadow. In the midst of the
colossal ruins, there lived a small community of farmers....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
There is nothing, never has been anything, quite like a busy spaceport on the outskirts of a
capital city of a populous planet. There are the huge machines resting mightily in their cradles.
If you choose your time properly, there is the impressive sight of the sinking giant dropping to
rest or, more hair-raising still, the swiftening departure of a bubble of steel. All processes
involved are nearly noiseless. The motive power is the silent surge of nucleons shifting into
more compact arrangements
In terms of area, ninety-five percent of the port has just been referred to. Square miles are
reserved for the machines, and for the men who serve them and for the calculators that serve
both.
Only five percent of the port is given over to the floods of humanity to whom it is the way station
to all the stars of the Galaxy. It is certain that very few of the anonymous many-headed stop to
consider the technological mesh that knits the spaceways. Perhaps some of them might itch
occasionally at the thought of the thousands of tons represented by the sinking steel that looks
so small off in the distance. One of those cyclopean cylinders could, conceivably, miss the
guiding beam and crash half a mile from its expected landing point - through the glassite roof
of the immense waiting room perhaps - so that only a thin organic vapor and some powdered
phosphates would be left behind to mark the passing of a thousand men.
It could never happen, however, with the safety devices in use; and only the badly neurotic
would consider the possibility for more than a moment.
Then what do they think about? It is not just a crowd, you see. It is a crowd with a purpose.
That purpose hovers over the field and thickens the atmosphere. Lines queue up; parents herd
their children; baggage is maneuvered in precise masses - people are going somewheres.
Consider then the complete psychic isolation of a single unit of this terribly intent mob that does
not know where to go; yet at the same time feels more intensely than any of the others possibly
can, the necessity of going somewheres; anywhere! Or almost anywhere!
Even lacking telepathy or any of the crudely definite methods of mind touching mind, there is a
sufficient clash in atmosphere, in intangible mood, to suffice for despair.
To suffice? To overflow, and drench, and drown.
Arcadia Darell, dressed in borrowed clothes, standing on a borrowed planet in a borrowed
situation of what seemed even to be a borrowed life, wanted earnestly the safety of the womb.
She didn't know that was what she wanted. She only knew that the very openness of the open
world was a great danger. She wanted a closed spot somewhere - somewhere far -
somewhere in an unexplored nook of the universe - where no one would ever look.
And there she was, age fourteen plus, weary enough for eighty plus, frightened enough for five
minus.
What stranger of the hundreds that brushed past her - actually brushed past her, so that she
could feel their touch - was a Second Foundationer? What stranger could not help but instantly
destroy her for her guilty knowledge - her unique knowledge - of knowing where the Second
Foundation was?
And the voice that cut in on her was a thunderclap that iced the scream in her throat into a
voiceless slash.
"Look, miss," it said, irritably, "are you using the ticket machine or are you just standing there?"
It was the first she realized that she was standing in front of a ticket machine. You put a high
denomination bill into the clipper which sank out of sight. You pressed the button below your
destination and a ticket came out together with the correct change as determined by an
electronic scanning device that never made a mistake. It was a very ordinary thing and there is
no cause for anyone to stand before it for five minutes.
Arcadia plunged a two-hundred credit into the clipper, and was suddenly aware of the button
labeled "Trantor." Trantor, dead capital of the dead Empire - the planet on which she was born.
She pressed it in a dream. Nothing happened, except that the red letters flicked on and off,
reading 172.18- 172.18— 172.18—
It was the amount she was short. Another two-hundred credit. The ticket was spit out towards
her. It came loose when she touched it, and the change tumbled out afterward.
She seized it and ran. She felt the man behind her pressing close, anxious for his own chance
at the machine, but she twisted out from before him and did not look behind.
Yet there was nowhere to run. They were all her enemies.
Without quite realizing it, she was watching the gigantic, glowing signs that puffed into the air:
Steffani, Anacreon, Fermus- There was even one that ballooned, Terminus, and she longed for
it, but did not dare-
For a trifling sum, she could have hired a notifier which could have been set for any destination
she cared and which would, when placed in her purse, make itself heard only to her, fifteen
minutes before take-off time. But such devices are for people who are reasonably secure,
however; who can pause to think of them.
And then, attempting to look both ways simultaneously, she ran head-on into a soft abdomen.
She felt the startled outbreath and grunt, and a hand come down on her arm. She writhed
desperately but lacked breath to do more than mew a bit in the back of her throat.
Her captor held her firmly and waited. Slowly, he came into focus for her and she managed to
look at him. He was rather plump and rather short. His hair was white and copious, being
brushed back to give a pompadour effect that looked strangely incongruous above a round and
ruddy face that shrieked its peasant origin.
"What's the matter?" he said finally, with a frank and twinkling curiosity. "You look scared."
"Sorry," muttered Arcadia in a frenzy. "I’ve got to go. Pardon me."
But he disregarded that entirely, and said, "Watch out, little girl. You'll drop your ticket." And he
lifted it from her resistless white fingers and looked at it with every evidence of satisfaction.
"I thought so," he said, and then bawled in bull-like tones, "Mommuh!"
A woman was instantly at his side, somewhat more short, somewhat more round, somewhat
more ruddy. She wound a finger about a stray gray lock to shove it beneath a well-outmoded
hat.
"Pappa," she said, reprovingly, "why do you shout in a crowd like that? People look at you like
you were crazy. Do you think you are on the farm?"
And she smiled sunnily at the unresponsive Arcadia, and added, "He has manners like a bear."
Then, sharply, "Pappa, let go the little girl. What are you doing?"
But Pappa simply waved the ticket at her. "Look," he said, "she's going to Trantor."
Mamma's face was a sudden beam, "You're from Trantor? Let go her arm, I say, Pappa." She
turned the overstuffed valise she was carrying onto its side and forced Arcadia to sit down with
a gentle but unrelenting pressure. "Sit down," she said, "and rest your little feet. It will be no
ship yet for an hour and the benches are crowded with sleeping loafers. You are from Trantor?"
Arcadia drew a deep breath and gave in. Huskily, she said, "I was born there."
And Mamma clapped her hands gleefully, "One month we've been here and till now we met
nobody from home. This is very nice. Your parents-" she looked about vaguely.
"I'm not with my parents," Arcadia said, carefully.
"All alone? A little girl like you?" Mamma was at once a blend of indignation and sympathy,
"How does that come to be?"
"Mamma," Pappa plucked at her sleeve, "let me tell you. There's something wrong. I think she's
frightened." His voice, though obviously intended for a whisper was quite plainly audible to
Arcadia. "She was running - I was watching her - and not looking where she was going. Before
I could step out of the way, she bumped into me. And you know what? I think she's in trouble."
"So shut your mouth, Pappa. Into you, anybody could bump." But she joined Arcadia on the
valise, which creaked wearily under the added weight and put an arm about the girl's trembling
shoulder. "You're running away from somebody, sweetheart? Don't be afraid to tell me. Ill help
you."
Arcadia looked across at the kind gray eyes of the woman and felt her lips quivering. One part
of her brain was telling her that here were people from Trantor, with whom she could go, who
could help her remain on that planet until she could decide what next to do, where next to go.
And another part of her brain, much the louder, was telling her in jumbled incoherence that she
did not remember her mother, that she was weary to death of fighting the universe, that she
wanted only to curl into a little hall with strong, gentle arms about her, that if her mother had
lived, she might ... she might-
And for the first time that night, she was crying; crying like a little baby, and glad of it; clutching
tightly at the old-fashioned dress and dampening a corner of it thoroughly, while soft arms held
her closely and a gentle hand stroked her curls.
Pappa stood helplessly looking at the pair, fumbling futilely for a handkerchief which, when
produced, was snatched from his hand. Mamma glared an admonition of quietness at him. The
crowds surged about the little group with the true indifference of disconnected crowds
everywhere. They were effectively alone.
Finally, the weeping trickled to a halt, and Arcadia smiled weakly as she dabbed at red eyes
with the borrowed handkerchief. "Golly," she whispered,
"S/7/7. S/7/7. Don't talk," said Mamma, fussily, "just sit and rest for a while. Catch your breath.
Then tell us what's wrong, and you'll see, we'll fix it up, and everything will be all right."
Arcadia scrabbled what remained of her wits together. She could not tell them the truth. She
could tell nobody the truth- And yet she was too worn to invent a useful lie.
She said, whisperingly, "I'm better, now."
"Good," said Mamma. "Now tell me why you’re in trouble. You did nothing wrong? Of course,
whatever you did, well help you; but tell us the truth."
"For a friend from Trantor, anything," added Pappa, expansively, "eh, Mamma?"
"Shut your mouth, Pappa," was the response, without rancor.
Arcadia was groping in her purse. That, at least, was still hers, despite the rapid
clothes-changing forced upon her in Lady Callia's apartments. She found what she was looking
for and handed it to Mamma.
"These are my papers," she said, diffidently. It was shiny, synthetic parchment which had been
issued her by the Foundation's ambassador on the day of her arrival and which had been
countersigned by the appropriate Kalganian official. It was large, florid, and impressive.
Mamma looked at it helplessly, and passed it to Pappa who absorbed its contents with an
impressive pursing of the lips.
Fie said, "You're from the Foundation?"
"Yes. But I was born in Trantor. See it says that-"
"Ah-hah. It looks all right to me. You're named Arcadia, eh? That's a good Trantorian name. But
where's your uncle? It says here you came in the company of Homir Munn, uncle."
"He's been arrested," said Arcadia, drearily.
"Arrested!" - from the two of them at once. "What for?" asked Mamma. "He did something?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. We were just on a visit. Uncle Homir had business with
Lord Stettin but-" She needed no effort to act a shudder. It was there.
Pappa was impressed. "With Lord Stettin. Mm-m-m, your uncle must be a big man."
"I don't know what it was all about, but Lord Stettin wanted me to stay-" She was recalling the
last words of Lady Callia, which had been acted out for her benefit. Since Callia, as she now
knew, was an expert, the story could do for a second time.
She paused, and Mamma said interestedly, "And why you?"
"I'm not sure. He ... he wanted to have dinner with me all alone, but I said no, because I wanted
Uncle Homir along. He looked at me funny and kept holding my shoulder."
Pappa's mouth was a little open, but Mamma was suddenly red and angry. "How old are you,
Arcadia?"
"Fourteen and a half, almost."
Mamma drew a sharp breath and said, "That such people should be let live. The dogs in the
streets are better. You're running from him, dear, is not?"
Arcadia nodded.
Mamma said, "Pappa, go right to Information and find out exactly when the ship to Trantor
comes to berth. Hurry!"
But Pappa took one step and stopped. Loud metallic words were booming overhead, and five
thousand pairs of eyes looked startledly upwards.
"Men and women," it said, with sharp force. "The airport is being searched for a dangerous
fugitive, and it is now surrounded. No one can enter and no one can leave. The search will,
however, be conducted with great speed and no ships will reach or leave berth during the
interval, so you will not miss your ship. I repeat, no one will miss his ship. The grid will descend.
None of you will move outside your square until the grid is removed, as otherwise we will be
forced to use our neuronic whips."
During the minute or less in which the voice dominated the vast dome of the spaceport's
waiting room, Arcadia could not have moved if all the evil in the Galaxy had concentrated itself
into a ball and hurled itself at her.
They could mean only her. It was not even necessary to formulate that idea as a specific
thought. But why-
Callia had engineered her escape. And Callia was of the Second Foundation. Why, then, the
search now? Had Callia failed? Could Callia fail? Or was this part of the plan, the intricacies of
which escaped her?
For a vertiginous moment, she wanted to jump up and shout that she gave up, that she would
go with them, that ... that-
But Mamma's hand was on her wrist. "Quick! "Quick! Well go to the lady's room before they
start."
Arcadia did not understand. She merely followed blindly. They oozed through the crowd, frozen
as it was into clumps, with the voice still booming through its last words.
The grid was descending now, and Pappa, openmouthed, watched it come down. He had
heard of it and read of it, but had never actually been the object of it. It glimmered in the air,
simply a series of cross-hatched and tight radiation-beams that set the air aglow in a harmless
network of flashing light.
It always was so arranged as to descend slowly from above in order that it might represent a
falling net with all the terrific psychological implications of entrapment.
It was at waist-level now, ten feet between glowing lines in each direction. In his own hundred
square feet, Pappa found himself alone, yet the adjoining squares were crowded. He felt
himself conspicuously isolated but knew that to move into the greater anonymity of a group
would have meant crossing one of those glowing lines, stirring an alarm, and bringing down the
neuronic whip.
He waited.
He could make out over the heads of the eerily quiet and waiting mob, the far-off stir that was
the line of policemen covering the vast floor area, lighted square by lighted square.
It was a long time before a uniform stepped into his square and carefully noted its co-ordinates
into an official notebook.
"Papers!"
Pappa handed them over, and they were flipped through in expert fashion.
"You're Preem Palver, native of Trantor, on Kalgan for a month, returning to Trantor. Answer,
yes or no."
"Yes, yes."
"What's your business on Kalgan?"
"I'm trading representative of our farm co-operative. I've been negotiating terms with the
Department of Agriculture on Kalgan.
"Um-m-m. Your wife is with you? Where is she? She is mentioned in your papers."
"Please. My wife is in the-" He pointed.
"Hanto," roared the policeman. Another uniform joined him.
The first one said, dryly, "Another dame in the can, by the Galaxy. The place must be busting
with them. Write down her name." He indicated the entry in the papers which gave it.
"Anyone else with you?"
"My niece."
"She's not mentioned in the papers."
"She came separately."
"Where is she? Never mind, I know. Write down the niece's name, too, Hanto. What's her
name? Write down Arcadia Palver. You stay right here, Palver. We'll take care of the women
before we leave."
Pappa waited interminably. And then, long, long after, Mamma was marching toward him,
Arcadia's hand firmly in hers, the two policemen trailing behind her.
They entered Pappa's square, and one said, "Is this noisy old woman your wife?"
"Yes, sir," said Pappa, placatingly.
"Then you'd better tell her she's liable to get into trouble if she talks the way she does to the
First Citizen's police." He straightened his shoulders angrily. "Is this your niece?"
"Yes, sir."
"I want her papers."
Looking straight at her husband, Mamma slightly, but no less firmly, shook her head.
A short pause, and Pappa said with a weak smile, "I don't think I can do that."
"What do you mean you can't do that?" The policeman thrust out a hard palm. "Hand it over."
"Diplomatic immunity," said Pappa, softly.
"What do you mean?"
"I said I was trading representative of my farm co-operative. I'm accredited to the Kalganian
government as an official foreign representative and my papers prove it. I showed them to you
and now I don't want to be bothered any more."
For a moment, the policeman was taken aback. "I got to see your papers. It's orders."
"You go away," broke in Mamma, suddenly. "When we want you, we'll send for you, you ... you
bum. "
The policeman's lips tightened. "Keep your eye on them, Hanto. I'll get the lieutenant."
"Break a leg!" called Mamma after him. Someone laughed, and then choked it off suddenly.
The search was approaching its end. The crowd was growing dangerously restless. Forty-five
minutes had elapsed since the grid had started falling and that is too long for best effects.
Lieutenant Dirige threaded his way hastily, therefore, toward the dense center of the mob.
"Is this the girl?" he asked wearily. He looked at her and she obviously fitted the description. All
this for a child.
He said, "Her papers, if you please?"
Pappa began, "I have already explained-"
"I know what you have explained, and I'm sorry," said the lieutenant, "but I have my orders, and
I can't help them. If you care to make a protest later, you may. Meanwhile, if necessary, I must
use force."
There was a pause, and the lieutenant waited patiently.
Then Pappa said, huskily, "Give me your papers, Arcadia."
Arcadia shook her head in panic, but Pappa nodded his head. "Don't be afraid. Give them to
me."
Helplessly she reached out and let the documents change hands. Pappa fumbled them open
and looked carefully through them, then handed them over. The lieutenant in his turn looked
through them carefully. For a long moment, he raised his eyes to rest them on Arcadia, and
then he closed the booklet with a sharp snap.
"All in order," he said. "All right, men."
He left, and in two minutes, scarcely more, the grid was gone, and the voice above signified a
back-to-normal. The noise of the crowd, suddenly released, rose high.
Arcadia said: "How ... how-"
Pappa said, "Sh-h. Don't say a word. Let's better go to the ship. It should be in the berth soon."
They were on the ship. They had a private stateroom and a table to themselves in the dining
room. Two light-years already separated them from Kalgan, and Arcadia finally dared to broach
the subject again.
She said, "But they were after me, Mr. Palver, and they must have had my description and all
the details. Why did he let me go?"
And Pappa smiled broadly over his roast beef. "Well, Arcadia, child, it was easy. When you've
been dealing with agents and buyers and competing co-operatives, you learn some of the
tricks. I've had twenty years or more to learn them in. You see, child, when the lieutenant
opened your papers, he found a five hundred credit bill inside, folded up small. Simple, no?"
"I’ll pay you back- Honest, I've got lots of money."
"Well," Pappa's broad face broke into an embarrassed smile, as he waved it away. "For a
country-woman-"
Arcadia desisted. "But what if he'd taken the money and turned me in anyway. And accused me
of bribery."
"And give up five hundred credits? I know these people better than you do, girl."
But Arcadia knew that he did not know people better. Not these people. In her bed that night,
she considered carefully, and knew that no bribe would have stopped a police lieutenant in the
matter of catching her unless that had been planned. They didn't want to catch her, yet had
made every motion of doing so, nevertheless.
Why? To make sure she left? And for Trantor? Were the obtuse and soft-hearted couple she
was with now only a pair of tools in the hands of the Second Foundation, as helpless as she
herself?
They must be!
Or were they?
It was all so useless. How could she fight them. Whatever she did, it might only be what those
terrible omnipotents wanted her to do.
Yet she had to outwit them. Had to. Had to! Had to!!
16
Beginning of War
For reason or reasons unknown to members of the Galaxy at the time of the era under
discussion, Intergalactic Standard Time defines its fundamental unit, the second, as the time in
which light travels 299,776 kilometers. 86,400 seconds are arbitrarily set equal to one
Intergalactic Standard Day; and 365 of these days to one Intergalactic Standard Year.
Why 299,776?- Or 86,400?- Or 365?
Tradition, says the historian, begging the question. Because of certain and various mysterious
numerical relationships, say the mystics, cultists, numerologists, metaphysicists. Because the
original home-planet of humanity had certain natural periods of rotation and revolution from
which those relationships could be derived, say a very few.
No one really knew.
Nevertheless, the date on which the Foundation cruiser, the Hober Mallow met the Kalganian
squadron, headed by the Fearless, and, upon refusing to allow a search party to board, was
blasted into smoldering wreckage was 185; 11692 G.E. That is, it was the 185th day of the
1 1 ,692nd year of the Galactic Era which dated from the accession of the first Emperor of the
traditional Kamble dynasty. It was also 1 85; 41 9 A.S. - dating from the birth of Seldon - or 1 85;
348 Y.F. - dating from the establishment of the Foundation. On Kalgan it was 185; 56 F.C. -
dating from the establishment of the First Citizenship by the Mule. In each case, of course, for
convenience, the year was so arranged as to yield the same day number regardless of the
actual day upon which the era began.
And, in addition, to all the millions of worlds of the Galaxy, there were millions of local times,
based on the motions of their own particular heavenly neighbors.
But whichever you choose: 185; 11 692-41 9-348-56 - or anything - it was this day which
historians later pointed to when they spoke of the start of the Stettinian war.
Yet to Dr. Darell, it was none of these at all. It was simply and quite precisely the thirty-second
day since Arcadia had left Terminus.
What it cost Darell to maintain stolidity through these days was not obvious to everyone.
But Elvett Semic thought he could guess. Fie was an old man and fond of saying that his
neuronic sheaths had calcified to the point where his thinking processes were stiff and
unwieldy. Fie invited and almost welcomed the universal underestimation of his decaying
powers by being the first to laugh at them. But his eyes were none the less seeing for being
faded; his mind none the less experienced and wise, for being no longer agile.
Fie merely twisted his pinched lips and said, "Why don't you do something about it?"
The sound was a physical jar to Darell, under which he winced. Fie said, gruffly, "Where were
we?"
Semic regarded him with grave eyes. "You'd better do something about the girl." FHis sparse,
yellow teeth showed in a mouth that was open in inquiry.
But Darell replied coldly, "The question is: Can you get a Symes-Molff Resonator in the range
required?"
Well, I said I could and you weren't listening-"
"I'm sorry, Elvett. It's like this. What we're doing now can be more important to everyone in the
Galaxy than the question of whether Arcadia is safe. At least, to everyone but Arcadia and
myself, and I'm willing to go along with the majority. How big would the Resonator be?"
Semic looked doubtful, "I don't know. You can find it somewheres in the catalogues."
"About how big. A ton? A pound? A block long?"
"Oh, I thought you meant exactly. It's a little jigger." He indicated the first joint of his thumb.
"About that."
"All right, can you do something like this?" He sketched rapidly on the pad he held in his lap,
then passed it over to the old physicist, who peered at it doubtfully, then chuckled.
"Y'know, the brain gets calcified when you get as old as I am. What are you trying to do?"
Darell hesitated. He longed desperately, at the moment, for the physical knowledge locked in
the other's brain, so that he need not put his thought into words. But the longing was useless,
and he explained.
Semic was shaking his head. "You'd need hyper-relays. The only things that would work fast
enough. A thundering lot of them."
"But it can be built?"
"Well, sure."
"Can you get all the parts? I mean, without causing comment? In line with your general work."
Semic lifted his upper lip. "Can't get fifty hyper-relays? I wouldn't use that many in my whole
life."
"We're on a defense project, now. Can't you think of something harmless that would use them?
We've got the money."
"Hm-m-m. Maybe I can think of something."
"How small can you make the whole gadget?"
"Hyper-relays can be had micro-size ... wiring ... tubes - Space, you've got a few hundred
circuits there."
"I know. How big?"
Semic indicated with his hands.
"Too big," said Darell. "I've got to swing it from my belt"
Slowly, he was crumpling his sketch into a tight ball. When it was a hard, yellow grape, he
dropped it into the ash tray and it was gone with the tiny white flare of molecular decomposition.
He said, "Who's at your door?"
Semic leaned over his desk to the little milky screen above the door signal. He said, "The
young fellow, Anthor. Someone with him, too."
Darell scraped his chair back. "Nothing about this, Semic, to the others yet. It's deadly
knowledge, if they find out, and two lives are enough to risk."
Pelleas Anthor was a pulsing vortex of activity in Semic's office, which, somehow, managed to
partake of the age of its occupant. In the slow turgor of the quiet room, the loose, summery
sleeves of Anthor's tunic seemed still a-quiver with the outer breezes.
He said, "Dr. Darell, Dr. Semic - Orum Dirige."
The other man was tall. A long straight nose that lent his thin face a saturnine appearance. Dr.
Darell held out a hand.
Anthor smiled slightly. "Police Lieutenant Dirige," he amplified. Then, significantly, "Of Kalgan."
And Darell turned to stare with force at the young man. "Police Lieutenant Dirige of Kalgan," he
repeated, distinctly. "And you bring him here. Why?"
"Because he was the last man on Kalgan to see your daughter. Hold, man."
Anthor's look of triumph was suddenly one of concern, and he was between the two, struggling
violently with Darell. Slowly, and not gently, he forced the older man back into the chair.
"What are you trying to do?" Anthor brushed a lock of brown hair from his forehead, tossed a
hip lightly upon the desk, and swung a leg, thoughtfully. "I thought I was bringing you good
news."
Darell addressed the policeman directly, "What does he mean by calling you the last man to
see my daughter? Is my daughter dead? Please tell me without preliminary." His face was
white with apprehension.
Lieutenant Dirige said expressionlessly, "‘Last man on Kalgan' was the phrase. She's not on
Kalgan now. I have no knowledge past that."
"Here," broke in Anthor, "let me put it straight. Sorry if I overplayed the drama a bit, Doc. You're
so inhuman about this, I forget you have feelings. In the first place, Lieutenant Dirige is one of
us. He was born on Kalgan, but his father was a Foundation man brought to that planet in the
service of the Mule. I answer for the lieutenant's loyalty to the Foundation.
"Now I was in touch with him the day after we stopped getting the daily report from Munn-"
"Why?" broke in Darell, fiercely. "I thought it was quite decided that we were not to make a
move in the matter. You were risking their lives and ours."
"Because," was the equally fierce retort, "I've been involved in this game for longer than you.
Because I know of certain contacts on Kalgan of which you know nothing. Because I act from
deeper knowledge, do you understand?"
"I think you're completely mad."
"Will you listen?"
A pause, and Darell's eyes dropped.
Anthor's lips quirked into a half smile, "All right, Doc. Give me a few minutes. Tell him, Dirige."
Dirige spoke easily: "As far as I know, Dr. Darell, your daughter is at Trantor. At least, she had
a ticket to Trantor at the Eastern Spaceport. She was with a Trading Representative from that
planet who claimed she was his niece. Your daughter seems to have a queer collection of
relatives, doctor. That was the second uncle she had in a period of two weeks, eh? The
Trantorian even tried to bribe me - probably thinks that's why they got away." He smiled grimly
at the thought.
"How was she?"
"Unharmed, as far as I could see. Frightened. I don't blame her for that. The whole department
was after her. I still don't know why."
Darell drew a breath for what seemed the first time in several minutes. He was conscious of the
trembling of his hands and controlled them with an effort. "Then she's all right. This Trading
Representative, who was he? Go back to him. What part does he play in it?"
"I don't know. Do you know anything about Trantor?"
"I lived there once."
"It's an agricultural world, now. Exports animal fodder and grains, mostly. High quality! They sell
them all over the Galaxy. There are a dozen or two farm co-operatives on the planet and each
has its representatives overseas. Shrewd sons of guns, too- I knew this one's record. He'd
been on Kalgan before, usually with his wife. Perfectly honest. Perfectly harmless."
"Um-m-m," said Anthor. "Arcadia was born in Trantor, wasn't she, Doc?"
Darell nodded.
"It hangs together, you see. She wanted to go away - quickly and far - and Trantor would
suggest itself. Don't you think so?"
Darell said: "Why not back here?"
"Perhaps she was being pursued and felt that she had to double off in a new angle, eh?'
Dr. Darell lacked the heart to question further. Well, then, let her be safe on Trantor, or as safe
as one could be anywhere in this dark and horrible Galaxy. He groped toward the door, felt
Anthor's light touch on his sleeve, and stopped, but did not turn.
"Mind if I go home with you, Doc?"
"You're welcome," was the automatic response.
By evening, the exteriormost reaches of Dr. Darell's personality, the ones that made immediate
contact with other people had solidified once more. He had refused to eat his evening meal and
had, instead, with feverish insistence, returned to the inchwise advance into the intricate
mathematics of encephalographic analysis.
It was not till nearly midnight, that he entered the living room again.
Pelleas Anthor was still there, twiddling at the controls of the video. The footsteps behind him
caused him to glance over his shoulder.
"Hi. Aren't you in bed yet? I've been spending hours on the video, trying to get something other
than bulletins. It seems the F.S. Hober Mallow is delayed in course and hasn't been heard
from"
"Really? What do they suspect?"
"What do you think? Kalganian skulduggery. There are reports that Kalganian vessels were
sighted in the general space sector in which the Hober Mallow was last heard from?"
Darell shrugged, and Anthor rubbed his forehead doubtfully.
"Look doc," he said, "why don't you go to Trantor?"
"Why should I?"
"Because "You're no good to us here. You're not yourself. You can't be. And you could
accomplish a purpose by going to Trantor, too. The old Imperial Library with the complete
records of the Proceedings of the Seldon Commission are there-"
"No! The Library has been picked clean and it hasn't helped anyone."
"It helped Ebling Mis once."
"How do you know? Yes, he said he found the Second Foundation, and my mother killed him
five seconds later as the only way to keep him from unwittingly revealing its location to the
Mule. But in doing so, she also, you realize, made it impossible ever to tell whether Mis really
did know the location. After all, no one else has ever been able to deduce the truth from those
records."
"Ebling Mis, if you'll remember, was working under the driving impetus of the Mule's mind."
"I know that, too, but Mis' mind was, by that very token, in an abnormal state. Do you and I
know anything about the properties of a mind under the emotional control of another; about its
abilities and shortcomings? In any case, I will not go to Trantor."
Anthor frowned, "Well, why the vehemence? I merely suggested it as - well, by Space, I don't
understand you. You look ten years older. You're obviously having a hellish time of it. You're
not doing anything of value here. If I were you, I'd go and get the girl."
"Exactly! It's what I want to do, too. That's why I won't do it. Look, Anthor, and try to understand.
You're playing - we're both playing - with something completely beyond our powers to fight. In
cold blood, if you have any, you know that, whatever you may think in your moments of
quixoticism.
"For fifty years, we've known that the Second Foundation is the real descendent and pupil of
Seldonian mathematics. What that means, and you know that, too, is that nothing in the Galaxy
happens which does not play a part in their reckoning. To us, all life is a series of accidents, to
be met with by improvisations To them, all life is purposive and should be met by
precalculation.
"But they have their weakness. Their work is statistical and only the mass action of humanity is
truly inevitable. Now how / play a part, as an individual, in the foreseen course of history, I don't
know. Perhaps I have no definite part, since the Plan leaves individuals to indeterminacy and
free will. But I am important and they - they , you understand - may at least have calculated my
probable reaction. So I distrust, my impulses, my desires, my probable reactions.
"I would rather present them with an improbable reaction. I will stay here, despite the fact that I
yearn very desperately to leave. "No! Because I yearn very desperately to leave."
The younger man smiled sourly. "You don't know your own mind as well as they might.
Suppose that - knowing you - they might count on what you think, merely think, is the
improbable reaction, simply by knowing in advance what your line of reasoning would be."
"In that case, there is no escape. For if I follow the reasoning you have just outlined and go to
Trantor, they may have foreseen that, too. There is an endless cycle of
double-double-double-double-crosses. No matter how far I follow that cycle, I can only either go
or stay. The intricate act of luring my daughter halfway across the Galaxy cannot be meant to
make me stay where I am, since I would most certainly have stayed if they had done nothing. It
can only be to make me move, and so I will stay.
"And besides, Anthor, not everything bears the breath of the Second Foundation; not all events
are the results of their puppeting. They may have had nothing to do with Arcadia's leave-taking,
and she may be safe on Trantor when all the rest of us are dead."
"No," said Anthor, sharply, "now you are off the track."
"You have an alternative interpretation?"
"I have - if you’ll listen."
"Oh, go ahead. I don't lack patience."
"Well, then - how well do you know your own daughter?"
"Flow well can any individual know any other? Obviously, my knowledge is inadequate."
"So is mine on that basis, perhaps even more so - but at least, I viewed her with fresh eyes.
Item one: She is a ferocious little romantic, the only child of an ivory-tower academician,
growing up in an unreal world of video and book-film adventure. She lives in a weird
self-constructed fantasy of espionage and intrigue. Item two: She's intelligent about it; intelligent
enough to outwit us, at any rate. She planned carefully to overhear our first conference and
succeeded. She planned carefully to go to Kalgan with Munn and succeeded. Item three: She
has an unholy hero-worship of her grandmother - your mother - who defeated the Mule.
"I'm right so far, I think? All right, then. Now, unlike you, I've received a complete report from
Lieutenant Dirige and, in addition, my sources of information on Kalgan are rather complete,
and all sources check. We know, for instance, that Homir Munn, in conference with the Lord of
Kalgan was refused admission to the Mule's Palace, and that this refusal was suddenly
abrogated after Arcadia had spoken to Lady Callia, the First Citizen's very good friend."
Darell interrupted. "And how do you know all this?"
"For one thing, Munn was interviewed by Dirige as part of the police campaign to locate
Arcadia. Naturally, we have a complete transcript of the questions and answers.
"And take Lady Callia herself. It is rumored that she has lost Stettin's interest, but the rumor
isn't borne out by facts. She not only remains unreplaced; is not only able to mediate the lord's
refusal to Munn into an acceptance; but can even engineer Arcadia's escape openly. Why, a
dozen of the soldiers about Stettin's executive mansion testified that they were seen together
on the last evening. Yet she remains unpunished. This despite the fact that Arcadia was
searched for with every appearance of diligence."
"But what is your conclusion from all this torrent of ill-connection?"
"That Arcadia's escape was arranged."
"As I said."
"With this addition. That Arcadia must have known it was arranged; that Arcadia, the bright little
girl who saw cabals everywhere, saw this one and followed your own type of reasoning. They
wanted her to return to the Foundation, and so she went to Trantor, instead. But why Trantor?"
"Well, why?"
"Because that is where Bayta, her idolized grandmother, escaped when she was in flight.
Consciously or unconsciously, Arcadia imitated that. I wonder, then, if Arcadia was fleeing the
same enemy."
"The Mule?" asked Darell with polite sarcasm.
"Of course not. I mean, by the enemy, a mentality that she could not fight. She was running
from the Second Foundation, or such influence thereof as could be found on Kalgan."
"What influence is this you speak of?"
"Do you expect Kalgan to be immune from that ubiquitous menace? We both have come to the
conclusion, somehow, that Arcadia's escape was arranged. Right? She was searched for and
found, but deliberately allowed to slip away by Dirige. By Dirige, do you understand? But how
was that? Because he was our man. But how did they know that? Were they counting on him to
be a traitor? Eh, doc?"
"Now you're saying that they honestly meant to recapture her. Frankly, you're tiring me a bit,
Anthor. Finish your say; I want to go to bed."
"My say is quickly finished." Anthor reached for a small group of photo-records in his inner
pocket. It was the familiar wigglings of the encephalograph. "Dirige's brainwaves," Anthor said,
casually, "taken since he returned."
It was quite visible to Darell's naked eye, and his face was gray when he looked up. "Fie is
Controlled."
"Exactly. Fie allowed Arcadia to escape not because he was our man but because he was the
Second Foundation's."
"Even after he knew she was going to Trantor, and not to Terminus."
Anthor shrugged. "Fie had been geared to let her go. There was no way he could modify that.
Fie was only a tool, you see. It was just that Arcadia followed the least probable course, and is
probably safe. Or at least safe until such time as the Second Foundation can modify the plans
to take into account this changed state of affairs-"
Fie paused. The little signal light on the video set was flashing. On an independent circuit, it
signified the presence of emergency news. Darell saw it, too, and with the mechanical
movement of long habit turned on the video. They broke in upon the middle of a sentence but
before its completion, they knew that the Hober Mallow, or the wreck thereof, had been found
and that, for the first time in nearly half a century, the Foundation was again at war.
Anthor's jaw was set in a hard line. "All right, doc, you heard that. Kalgan has attacked; and
Kalgan is under the control of the Second Foundation. Will you follow your daughter's lead and
move to Trantor?"
"No. I will risk it. Here."
"Dr. Darell. You are not as intelligent as your daughter. I wonder how far you can be trusted."
His long level stare held Darell for a moment, and then without a word, he left.
And Darell was left in uncertainty and - almost - despair.
Unheeded, the video was a medley of excited sight-sound, as it described in nervous detail the
first hour of the war between Kalgan and the Foundation.
17
War
The mayor of the Foundation brushed futilely at the picket fence of hair that rimmed his skull.
He sighed. "The years that we have wasted; the chances we have thrown away. I make no
recriminations, Dr. Darell, but we deserve defeat."
Darell said, quietly, "I see no reason for lack of confidence in events, sir.
"Lack of confidence! Lack of confidence! By the Galaxy, Dr. Darell, on what would you base
any other attitude? Come here-"
He half-led half-forced Darell toward the limpid ovoid cradled gracefully on its tiny force-field
support. At a touch of the mayor's hand, it glowed within - an accurate three-dimensional
model of the Galactic double-spiral.
"In yellow," said the mayor, excitedly, "we have that region of Space under Foundation control;
in red, that under Kalgan."
What Darell saw was a crimson sphere resting within a stretching yellow fist that surrounded it
on all sides but that toward the center of the Galaxy.
"Galactography," said the mayor, "is our greatest enemy. Our admirals make no secret of our
almost hopeless, strategic position. Observe. The enemy has inner lines of communication. He
is concentrated; can meet us on all sides with equal ease. He can defend himself with minimum
force.
"We are expanded. The average distance between inhabited systems within the Foundation is
nearly three times that within Kalgan. To go from Santanni to Locris, for instance, is a voyage of
twenty-five hundred parsecs for us, but only eight hundred parsecs for them, if we remain within
our respective territories-"
Darell said, "I understand all that, sir."
"And you do not understand that it may mean defeat."
"There is more than distance to war. I say we cannot lose. It is quite impossible."
"And why do you say that?"
"Because of my own interpretation of the Seldon Plan."
"Oh," the mayor's lips twisted, and the hands behind his back flapped one within the other,
"then you rely, too, on the mystical help of the Second Foundation."
"No. Merely on the help of inevitability - and of courage and persistence."
And yet behind his easy confidence, he wondered-
What if-
Well- What if Anthor were right, and Kalgan were a direct tool of the mental wizards. What if it
was their purpose to defeat and destroy the Foundation. No! It made no sense!
And yet-
He smiled bitterly. Always the same. Always that peering and peering through the opaque
granite which, to the enemy, was so transparent.
Nor were the galactographic verities of the situation lost upon Stettin.
The Lord of Kalgan stood before a twin of the Galactic model which the mayor and Darell had
inspected. Except that where the mayor frowned, Stettin smiled.
His admiral's uniform glistered imposingly upon his massive figure. The crimson sash of the
Order of the Mule awarded him by the former First Citizen whom six months later he had
replaced somewhat forcefully, spanned his chest diagonally from right shoulder to waist. The
Silver Star with Double Comets and Swords sparkled brilliantly upon his left shoulder.
He addressed the six men of his general staff whose uniforms were only less grandiloquent
than his own, and his First Minister as well, thin and gray - a darkling cobweb, lost in the
brightness.
Stettin said, "I think the decisions are clear. We can afford to wait. To them, every day of delay
will be another blow at their morale. If they attempt to defend all portions of their realm, they will
be spread thin and we can strike through in two simultaneous thrusts here and here." He
indicated the directions on the Galactic model - two lances of pure white shooting through the
yellow fist from the red ball it inclosed, cutting Terminus off on either side in a tight arc. "In such
a manner, we cut their fleet into three parts which can be defeated in detail. If they concentrate,
they give up two-thirds of their dominions voluntarily and will probably risk rebellion."
The First Minister's thin voice alone seeped through the hush that followed. "In six months," he
said, "the Foundation will grow six months stronger. Their resources are greater, as we all
know, their navy is numerically stronger; their manpower is virtually inexhaustible. Perhaps a
quick thrust would be safer."
His was easily the least influential voice in the room. Lord Stettin smiled and made a flat
gesture with his hand. "The six months - or a year, if necessary - will cost us nothing. The men
of the Foundation cannot prepare; they are ideologically incapable of it. It is in their very
philosophy to believe that the Second Foundation will save them. But not this time, eh?"
The men in the room stirred uneasily.
"You lack confidence, I believe," said Stettin, frigidly. "Is it necessary once again to describe the
reports of our agents in Foundation territory, or to repeat the findings of Mr. Homir Munn, the
Foundation agent now in our ... uh ... service? Let us adjourn, gentlemen."
Stettin returned to his private chambers with a fixed smile still on his face. He sometimes
wondered about this Homir Munn. A queer water-spined fellow who certainly did not bear out
his early promise. And yet he crawled with interesting information that carried conviction with it
- particularly when Callia was present.
His smile broadened. That fat fool had her uses, after all. At least, she got more with her
wheedling out of Munn than he could, and with less trouble. Why not give her to Munn? He
frowned. Callia. She and her stupid jealousy. Space! If he still had the Darell girl- Why hadn't he
ground her skull to powder for that?
He couldn't quite put his finger on the reason.
Maybe because she got along with Munn. And he needed Munn. It was Munn, for instance,
who had demonstrated that, at least in the belief of the Mule, there was no Second Foundation.
His admirals needed that assurance.
He would have liked to make the proofs public, but it was better to let the Foundation believe in
their nonexistent help. Was it actually Callia who had pointed that out? That's right. She had
said-
Oh, nonsense! She couldn't have said anything.
And yet-
He shook his head to clear it and passed on.
18
Ghost of a World
Trantor was a world in dregs and rebirth. Set like a faded jewel in the midst of the bewildering
crowd of suns at the center of the Galaxy - in the heaps and clusters of stars piled high with
aimless prodigality - it alternately dreamed of past and future.
Time had been when the insubstantial ribbons of control had stretched out from its metal
coating to the very edges of stardom. It had been a single city, housing four hundred billion
administrators; the mightiest capital that had ever been.
Until the decay of the Empire eventually reached it and in the Great Sack of a century ago, its
drooping powers had been bent back upon themselves and broken forever. In the blasting ruin
of death, the metal shell that circled the planet wrinkled and crumpled into an aching mock of its
own grandeur.
The survivors tore up the metal plating and sold it to other planets for seed and cattle. The soil
was uncovered once more and the planet returned to its beginnings. In the spreading areas of
primitive agriculture, it forgot its intricate and colossal past.
Or would have but for the still mighty shards that heaped their massive ruins toward the sky in
bitter and dignified silence.
Arcadia watched the metal rim of the horizon with a stirring of the heart. The village in which the
Palvers lived was but a huddle of houses to her - small and primitive. The fields that
surrounded it were golden-yellow, wheat-clogged tracts.
But there, just past the reaching point was the memory of the past, still glowing in unrusted
splendor, and burning with fire where the sun of Trantor caught it in gleaming highlights. She
had been there once during the months since she had arrived at Trantor. She had climbed onto
the smooth, unjointed pavement and ventured into the silent dust-streaked structures, where
the light entered through the jags of broken walls and partitions.
It had been solidified heartache. It had been blasphemy.
She had left, clangingly - running until her feet pounded softly on earth once more.
And then she could only look back longingly. She dared not disturb that mighty brooding once
more.
Somewhere on this world, she knew, she had been born - near the old Imperial Library, which
was the veriest Trantor of Trantor. It was the sacred of the sacred; the holy of holies! Of all the
world, it alone had survived the Great Sack and for a century it had remained complete and
untouched; defiant of the universe.
There Hari Seldon and his group had woven their unimaginable web. There Ebling Mis pierced
the secret, and sat numbed in his vast surprise, until he was killed to prevent the secret from
going further.
There at the Imperial Library, her grandparents had lived for ten years, until the Mule died, and
they could return to the reborn Foundation.
There at the Imperial Library, her own father returned with his bride to find the Second
Foundation once again, but failed. There, she had been born and there her mother had died.
She would have liked to visit the Library, but Preem Palver shook his round head. "It's
thousands of miles, Arkady, and there's so much to do here. Besides, it's not good to bother
there. You know; it's a shrine-"
But Arcadia knew that he had no desire to visit the Library; that it was a case of the Mule's
Palace over again. There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present
for the relies of the giants of the past.
Yet it would have been horrible to feel a grudge against the funny little man for that. She had
been on Trantor now for nearly three months and in all that time, he and she - Pappa and
Mamma - had been wonderful to her-
And what was her return? Why, to involve them in the common ruin. Had she warned them that
she was marked for destruction, perhaps? No! She let them assume the deadly role of
protectors.
Her conscience panged unbearably - yet what choice had she?
She stepped reluctantly down the stairs to breakfast. The voices reached her.
Preem Palver had tucked the napkin down his shirt collar with a twist of his plump neck and
had reached for his poached eggs with an uninhibited satisfaction.
"I was down in the city yesterday, Mamma," he said, wielding his fork and nearly drowning the
words with a capacious mouthful.
"And what is down in the city, Pappa?" asked Mamma indifferently, sitting down, looking
sharply about the table, and rising again for the salt.
"Ah, not so good. A ship came in from out Kalgan-way with newspapers from there. It's war
there."
War! So! Well, let them break their heads, if they have no more sense inside. Did your pay
check come yet? Pappa, I'm telling you again. You warn old man Cosker this isn't the only
cooperative in the world. It's bad enough they pay you what I'm ashamed to tell my friends, but
at least on time they could be!"
"Time; shmime," said Pappa, irritably. "Look, don't make me silly talk at breakfast, it should
choke me each bite in the throat," and he wreaked havoc among the buttered toast as he said
it. He added, somewhat more moderately, "The fighting is between Kalgan and the Foundation,
and for two months, they've been at it."
His hands lunged at one another in mock-representation of a space fight.
"Um-m-m. And what's doing?"
"Bad for the Foundation. Well, you saw Kalgan; all soldiers. They were ready. The Foundation
was not, and so - poof T
And suddenly, Mamma laid down her fork and hissed, "Fool!"
"Huh?"
"Dumb-head! Your big mouth is always moving and wagging."
She was pointing quickly and when Pappa looked over his shoulder, there was Arcadia, frozen
in the doorway.
She said, "The Foundation is at war?"
Pappa looked helplessly at Mamma, then nodded.
"And they're losing?"
Again the nod.
Arcadia felt the unbearable catch in her throat, and slowly approached the table. "Is it over?"
she whispered.
"Over?" repeated Pappa, with false heartiness. "Who said it was over? In war, lots of things can
happen. And ... and-"
"Sit down, darling," said Mamma, soothingly. "No one should talk before breakfast. You're not in
a healthy condition with no food in the stomach."
But Arcadia ignored her. "Are the Kalganians on Terminus?"
"No," said Pappa, seriously. "The news is from last week, and Terminus is still fighting. This is
honest. I'm telling the truth. And the Foundation is still strong. Do you want me to get you the
newspapers?"
"Yes!"
She read them over what she could eat of her breakfast and her eyes blurred as she read.
Santanni and Korell were gone - without a fight. A squadron of the Foundation's navy had been
trapped in the sparsely-sunned Ifni sector and wiped out to almost the last ship.
And now the Foundation was back to the Four-Kingdom core - the original Realm which had
been built up under Salvor Hardin, the first mayor. But still it fought - and still there might be a
chance-and whatever happened, she must inform her father. She must somehow reach his ear.
She must!
But how? With a war in the way.
She asked Pappa after breakfast, "Are you going out on a new mission soon, Mr. Palver?"
Pappa was on the large chair on the front lawn, sunning himself. A fat cigar smoldered between
his plump fingers and he looked like a beatific pug-dog.
"A mission?" he repeated, lazily. "Who knows? It's a nice vacation and my leave isn't up. Why
talk about new missions? You're restless, Arkady?"
"Me? No, I like it here. You're very good to me, you and Mrs. Palver."
Fie waved his hand at her, brushing away her words.
Arcadia said, "I was thinking about the war."
"But don't think about it. What can you do? If it's something you can't help, why hurt yourself
over it?"
"But I was thinking that the Foundation has lost most of its farming worlds. They're probably
rationing food there."
Pappa looked uncomfortable. "Don't worry. It'll be all right."
She scarcely listened. "I wish I could carry food to them, that's what. You know after the Mule
died, and the Foundation rebelled, Terminus was just about isolated for a time and General
Flan Pritcher, who succeeded the Mule for a while was laying siege to it. Food was running
awfully low and my father says that his father told him that they only had dry amino-acid
concentrates that tasted terrible. Why, one egg cost two hundred credits. And then they broke
the siege just in time and food ships came through from Santanni. It must have been an awful
time. Probably it's happening all over, now."
There was a pause, and then Arcadia said, "You know, I'll bet the Foundation would be willing
to pay smuggler's prices for food now. Double and triple and more. Gee, if any co-operative, f'r
instance, here on Trantor took over the job, they might lose some ships, but, I'll bet they'd be
war millionaires before it was over. The Foundation Traders in the old days used to do that all
the time. There'd be a war, so they'd sell whatever was needed bad and take their chances.
Golly, they used to make as much as two million dollars out of one trip - profit. That was just
out of what they could carry on one ship, too."
Pappa stirred. His cigar had gone out, unnoticed. "A deal for food, huh? Hm-m-m- But the
Foundation is so far away."
"Oh, I know. I guess you couldn't do it from here. If you took a regular liner you probably
couldn't get closer than Massena or Smushyk, and after that you'd have to hire a small
scoutship or something to slip you through the lines."
Pappa's hand brushed at his hair, as he calculated.
Two weeks later, arrangements for the mission were completed. Mamma railed for most of the
time- First, at the incurable obstinacy with which he courted suicide. Then, at the incredible
obstinacy with which he refused to allow her to accompany him.
Pappa said, "Mamma, why do you act like an old lady. I can't take you. It's a man's work. What
do you think a war is? Fun? Child's play?"
"Then why do you go? Are you a man, you old fool - with a leg and half an arm in the grave.
Let some of the young ones go - not a fat bald-head like you?"
"I'm not a bald-head," retorted Pappa, with dignity. "I got yet lots of hair. And why should it not
be me that gets the commission? Why, a young fellow? Listen, this could mean millions?"
She knew that and she subsided.
Arcadia saw him once before he left.
She said, "Are you going to Terminus?"
"Why not? You say yourself they need bread and rice and potatoes. Well, I'll make a deal with
them, and they'll get it."
"Well, then - just one thing: If you're going to Terminus, could you ... would you see my father?"
And Pappa's face crinkled and seemed to melt into sympathy, "Oh - and I have to wait for you
to tell me. Sure, I'll see him. I'll tell him you're safe and everything's O.K., and when the war is
over, I'll bring you back."
"Thanks. I'll tell you how to find him. His name is Dr. Toran Darell and he lives in Stanmark.
That's just outside Terminus City, and you can get a little commuting plane that goes there.
We’re at 55 Channel Drive."
"Wait, and I’ll write it down."
"No, no," Arcadia's arm shot out. "You mustn't write anything down. You must remember - and
find him without anybody's help."
Pappa looked puzzled. Then he shrugged his shoulders. "All right, then. It's 55 Channel Drive
in Stanmark, outside Terminus City, and you commute there by plane. All right?"
"One other thing."
"Yes?"
"Would you tell him something from me?"
"Sure."
"I want to whisper it to you."
He leaned his plump cheek toward her, and the little whispered sound passed from one to the
other.
Pappa's eyes were round. "That's what you want me to say? But it doesn't make sense."
"He'll know what you mean. Just say I sent it and that I said he would know what it means. And
you say it exactly the way I told you. No different. You won't forget it?"
"How can I forget it? Five little words. Look-"
"No, no." She hopped up and down in the intensity of her feelings. "Don't repeat it. Don't ever
repeat it to anyone. Forget all about it except to my father. Promise me."
Pappa shrugged again. "I promise! All right!"
"All right," she said, mournfully, and as he passed down the drive to where the air taxi waited to
take him to the spaceport, she wondered if she had signed his death warrant. She wondered if
she would ever see him again.
She scarcely dared to walk into the house again to face the good, kind Mamma. Maybe when it
was all over, she had better kill herself for what she had done to them.
19
End of War
QUORISTON, BATTLE OF Fought on 9, 17, 377 F.E. between the forces of the Foundation
and those of Lord Stettin of Kalgan, it was the last battle of consequence during the
Interregnum ....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Jole Turbor, in his new role of war correspondent, found his bulk incased in a naval uniform,
and rather liked it. He enjoyed being back on the air, and some of the fierce helplessness of the
futile fight against the Second Foundation left him in the excitement of another sort of fight with
substantial ships and ordinary men.
To be sure, the Foundation's fight had not been remarkable for victories, but it was still possible
to be philosophic about the matter. After six months, the hard core of the Foundation was
untouched, and the hard core of the Fleet was still in being. With the new additions since the
start of the war, it was almost as strong numerically, and stronger technically, than before the
defeat at Ifni.
And meanwhile, planetary defenses were being strengthened; the armed forces better trained;
administrative efficiency was having some of the water squeezed out of it - and much of the
Kalganian's conquering fleet was being wallowed down through the necessity of occupying the
"conquered" territory.
At the moment, Turbor was with the Third Fleet in the outer reaches of the Anacreonian sector.
In line with his policy of making this a "little man's war," he was interviewing Fennel Leemor,
Engineer Third Class, volunteer.
"Tell us a little about yourself, sailor," said Turbor.
"Ain't much to tell," Leemor shuffled his feet and allowed a faint, bashful smile to cover his face,
as though he could see all the millions that undoubtedly could see him at the moment. I’m a
Locrian. Got a job in an air-car factory; section head and good pay. I'm married; got two kids,
both girls. Say, I couldn't say hello to them, could I - in case they're listening."
"Go ahead, sailor. The video is all yours."
"Gosh, thanks." He burbled, "Hello, Milla, in case you're listening, I'm fine. Is Sunni all right?
And Tomma? I think of you all the time and maybe I'll be back on furlough after we get back to
port. I got your food parcel but I'm sending it back. We get our regular mess, but they say the
civilians are a little tight. I guess that's all."
"I'll look her up next time I'm on Locris, sailor, and make sure she's not short of food. O.K.?"
The young man smiled broadly and nodded his head. "Thank you, Mr. Turbor. I’d appreciate
that."
"All right. Suppose you tell us, then- You're a volunteer, aren't you?"
"Sure am. If anyone picks a fight with me, I don't have to wait for anyone to drag me in. I joined
up the day I heard about the Hober Mallow."
"That's a fine spirit. Have you seen much action? I notice "You're wearing two battle stars."
"Ptah."The sailor spat. "Those weren't battles, they were chases. The Kalganians don't fight,
unless they have odds of five to one or better in their favor. Even then they just edge in and try
to cut us up ship by ship. Cousin of mine was at Ifni and he was on a ship that got away, the old
Ebling Mis. He says it was the same there. They had their Main Fleet against just a wing
division of ours, and down to where we only had five ships left, they kept stalking instead of
fighting. We got twice as many of their ships at that fight."
"Then you think we're going to win the war?"
Sure bet; now that we aren't retreating. Even if things got too bad, that's when I'd expect the
Second Foundation to step in. We still got the Seldon Plan - and they know it, too."
Turbor's lips curled a bit. "You're counting on the Second Foundation, then?"
The answer came with honest surprise. "Well, doesn't everyone?"
Junior Officer Tippellum stepped into Turbor's room after the visicast. He shoved a cigarette at
the correspondent and knocked his cap back to a perilous balance on the occiput.
We picked up a prisoner," he said.
Yes?"
"Little crazy fellow. Claims to be a neutral - diplomatic immunity, no less. I don't think they know
what to do with him. His name's Palvro, Palver, something like that, and he says he's from
Trantor. Don't know what in space he's doing in a war zone."
But Turbor had swung to a sitting position on his bunk and the nap he had been about to take
was forgotten. He remembered quite well his last interview with Darell, the day after war had
been declared and he was shoving off.
"Preem Palver," he said. It was a statement.
Tippellum paused and let the smoke trickle out the sides of his mouth. "Yeah," he said, "how in
space did you know?"
"Never mind. Can I see him?"
"Space, / can't say. The old man has him in his own room for questioning. Everyone figures
he's a spy."
"You tell the old man that I know him, if he's who he claims he is. I’ll take the responsibility."
Captain Dixyl on the flagship of the Third Fleet watched unremittingly at the Grand Detector. No
ship could avoid being a source of subatomic radiation - not even if it were lying an inert mass
- and each focal point of such radiation was a little sparkle in the three-dimensional field.
Each one of the Foundation's ships were accounted for and no sparkle was left over, now that
the little spy who claimed to be a neutral had been picked up. For a while, that outside ship had
created a stir in the captain's quarters. The tactics might have needed changing on short notice.
As it was-
"Are you sure you have it?" he asked.
Commander Cenn nodded. "I will take my squadron through hyperspace: radius, 10.00
parsecs; theta, 268.52 degrees; phi, 84.15 degrees. Return to origin at 1330. Total absence
11.83 hours."
"Right. Now we are going to count on pin-point return as regards both space and time.
Understand?"
"Yes, captain." He looked at his wrist watch, "My ships will be ready by 0140."
"Good," said Captain Dixyl.
The Kalganian squadron was not within detector range now, but they would be soon. There
was independent information to that effect. Without Cenn's squadron the Foundation forces
would be badly outnumbered, but the captain was quite confident. Quite confident.
Preem Palver looked sadly about him. First at the tall, skinny admiral; then at the others,
everyone in uniform; and now at this last one, big and stout, with his collar open and no tie -
not like the rest - who said he wanted to speak to him.
Jole Turbor was saying: "I am perfectly aware, admiral, of the serious possibilities involved
here, but I tell you that if I can be allowed to speak to him for a few minutes, I may be able to
settle the current uncertainty."
"Is there any reason why you can't question him before me?"
Turbor pursed his lips and looked stubborn. "Admiral," he said, "while I have been attached to
your ships, the Third Fleet has received an excellent press. You may station men outside the
door, if you like, and you may return in five minutes. But, meanwhile, humor me a bit, and your
public relations will not suffer. Do you understand me?"
He did.
Then Turbor in the isolation that followed, turned to Palver, and said, "Quickly - what is the
name of the girl you abducted."
And Palver could simply stare round-eyed, and shake his head.
"No nonsense," said Turbor. "If you do not answer, you will be a spy and spies are blasted
without trial in war time."
"Arcadia Darell!" gasped Palver.
"Well! All right, then. Is she safe?"
Palver nodded.
"You had better be sure of that, or it won't be well for you."
"She is in good health, perfectly safe," said Palver, palely.
The admiral returned, "Well?"
"The man, sir, is not a spy. You may believe what he tells you. I vouch for him."
"That so?" The admiral frowned. "Then he represents an agricultural co-operative on Trantor
that wants to make a trade treaty with Terminus for the delivery of grains and potatoes. Well, all
right, but he can't leave now."
"Why not?" asked Palver, quickly.
"Because we're in the middle of a battle. After it is over - assuming we're still alive - we'll take
you to Terminus."
The Kalganian fleet that spanned through space detected the Foundation ships from an
incredible distance and were themselves detected. Like little fireflies in each other's Grand
Detectors, they closed in across the emptiness.
And the Foundation's admiral frowned and said, "This must be their main push. Look at the
numbers." Then, "They won't stand up before us, though; not if Cenn's detachment can be
counted on."
Commander Cenn had left hours before - at the first detection of the coming enemy. There was
no way of altering the plan now. It worked or it didn't, but the admiral felt quite comfortable. As
did the officers. As did the men.
Again watch the fireflies.
Like a deadly ballet dance, in precise formations, they sparked.
The Foundation fleet edged slowly backwards. Hours passed and the fleet veered slowly off,
teasing the advancing enemy slightly off course, then more so.
In the minds of the dictators of the battle plan, there was a certain volume of space that must
be occupied by the Kalganian ships. Out from that volume crept the Foundationers; into it
slipped the Kalganians. Those that passed out again were attacked, suddenly and fiercely.
Those that stayed within were not touched.
It all depended on the reluctance of the ships of Lord Stettin to take the initiative themselves -
on their willingness to remain where none attacked.
Captain Dixyl stared frigidly at his wrist watch. It was 1310, "We've got twenty minutes," he
said.
The lieutenant at his side nodded tensely, "It looks all right so far, captain. We've got more than
ninety percent of them boxed. If we can keep them that way-"
"Yes! If-"
The Foundation ships were drifting forward again - very slowly. Not quick enough to urge a
Kalganian retreat and just quickly enough to discourage a Kalganian advance. They preferred
to wait.
And the minutes passed.
At 1325, the admiral's buzzer sounded in seventy-five ships of the Foundation's line, and they
built up to a maximum acceleration towards the front-plane of the Kalganian fleet, itself three
hundred strong. Kalganian shields flared into action, and the vast energy beams flicked out.
Every one of the three hundred concentrated in the same direction, towards their mad attackers
who bore down relentlessly, uncaringly and-
At 1330, fifty ships under Commander Cenn appeared from nowhere, in one single bound
through hyperspace to a calculated spot at a calculated time - and were spaced in tearing fury
at the unprepared Kalganian rear.
The trap worked perfectly.
The Kalganians still had numbers on their side, but they were in no mood to count. Their first
effort was to escape and the formation once broken was only the more vulnerable, as the
enemy ships bumbled into one another's path.
After a while, it took on the proportions of a rat hunt.
Of three hundred Kalganian ships, the core and pride of their fleet, some sixty or less, many in
a state of near-hopeless disrepair, reached Kalgan once more. The Foundation loss was eight
ships out of a total of one hundred twenty-five.
Preem Palver landed on Terminus at the height of the celebration. He found the furore
distracting, but before he left the planet, he had accomplished two things, and received one
request.
The two things accomplished were: 1) the conclusion of an agreement whereby Palver's
co-operative was to deliver twenty shiploads of certain foodstuffs per month for the next year at
a war price, without, thanks to the recent battle, a corresponding war risk, and 2) the transfer to
Dr. Darell of Arcadia's five short words.
For a startled moment, Darell had stared wide-eyed at him, and then he had made his request.
It was to carry an answer back to Arcadia. Palver liked it; it was a simple answer and made
sense. It was: "Come back now. There won't be any danger."
Lord Stettin was in raging frustration. To watch his every weapon break in his hands; to feel the
firm fabric of his military might part like the rotten thread it suddenly turned out to be - would
have turned phlegmaticism itself into flowing lava. And yet he was helpless, and knew it.
He hadn't really slept well in weeks. He hadn't shaved in three days. He had canceled all
audiences. His admirals were left to themselves and none knew better than the Lord of Kalgan
that very little time and no further defeats need elapse before he would have to contend with
internal rebellion.
Lev Meirus, First Minister, was no help. He stood there, calm and indecently old, with his thin,
nervous finger stroking, as always, the wrinkled line from nose to chin.
"Well," shouted Stettin at him, "contribute something. We stand here defeated, do you
understand? Defeated! And why? I don't know why. There you have it. I don't know why. Do
you know why?"
"I think so," said Meirus, calmly.
"Treason!" The word came out softly, and other words followed as softly. "You've known of
treason, and you've kept quiet. You served the fool I ejected from the First Citizenship and you
think you can serve whatever foul rat replaces me. If you have acted so, I will extract your
entrails for it and burn them before your living eyes."
Meirus was unmoved. "I have tried to fill you with my own doubts, not once, but many times. I
have dinned it in your ears and you have preferred the advice of others because it stuffed your
ego better. Matters have turned out not as I feared, but even worse. If you do not care to listen
now, say so, sir, and I shall leave, and, in due course, deal with your successor, whose first act,
no doubt, will be to sign a treaty of peace."
Stettin stared at him red-eyed, enormous fists slowly clenching and unclenching. "Speak, you
gray slug. Speak!"
"I have told you often, sir, that you are not the Mule. You may control ships and guns but you
cannot control the minds of your subjects. Are you aware, sir, of who it is you are fighting? You
fight the Foundation, which is never defeated - the Foundation, which is protected by the
Seldon Plan - the Foundation, which is destined to form a new Empire."
"There is no Plan. No longer. Munn has said so."
"Then Munn is wrong. And if he were right, what then? You and I, sir, are not the people. The
men and women of Kalgan and its subject worlds believe utterly and deeply in the Seldon Plan
as do all the inhabitants of this end of the Galaxy. Nearly four hundred years of history teach
the fact that the Foundation cannot be beaten. Neither the kingdoms nor the warlords nor the
old Galactic Empire itself could do it."
"The Mule did it."
"Exactly, and he was beyond calculation - and you are not. What is worse, the people know
that you are not. So your ships go into battle fearing defeat in some unknown way. The
insubstantial fabric of the Plan hangs over them so that they are cautious and look before they
attack and wonder a little too much. While on the other side, that same insubstantial fabric fills
the enemy with confidence, removes fear, maintains morale in the face of early defeats. Why
not? The Foundation has always been defeated at first and has always won in the end.
"And your own morale, sir? You stand everywhere on enemy territory. Your own dominions
have not been invaded; are still not in danger of invasion - yet you are defeated. You don't
believe in the possibility, even, of victory, because you know there is none.
"Stoop, then, or you will be beaten to your knees. Stoop voluntarily, and you may save a
remnant. You have depended on metal and power and they have sustained you as far as they
could. You have ignored mind and morale and they have failed you. Now, take my advice. You
have the Foundation man, Homir Munn. Release him. Send him back to Terminus and he will
carry your peace offers."
Stettin's teeth ground behind his pale, set lips. But what choice had he?
On the first day of the new year, Homir Munn left Kalgan again. More than six months had
passed since he had left Terminus and in the interim, a war had raged and faded.
He had come alone, but he left escorted. He had come a simple man of private life; he left the
unappointed but nevertheless, actual, ambassador of peace.
And what had most changed was his early concern over the Second Foundation. He laughed at
the thought of that: and pictured in luxuriant detail the final revelation to Dr. Darell, to that
energetic, young competent, Anthor, to all of them-
He knew. He, Homir Munn, finally knew the truth.
20
"I Know ..."
The last two months of the Stettinian war did not lag for Homir. In his unusual office as Mediator
Extraordinary, he found himself the center of interstellar affairs, a role he could not help but find
pleasing.
There were no further major battles - a few accidental skirmishes that could scarcely count -
and the terms of the treaty were hammered out with little necessity for concessions on the part
of the Foundation. Stettin retained his office, but scarcely anything else. His navy was
dismantled; his possessions outside the home system itself made autonomous and allowed to
vote for return to previous status, full independence or confederation within the Foundation, as
they chose.
The war was formally ended on an asteroid in Terminus' own stellar system; site of the
Foundation's oldest naval base. Lev Meirus signed for Kalgan, and Homir was an interested
spectator.
Throughout all that period he did not see Dr. Darell, nor any of the others. But it scarcely
mattered. His news would keep - and, as always, he smiled at the thought.
Dr. Darell returned to Terminus some weeks after VK day, and that same evening, his house
served as the meeting place for the five men who, ten months earlier, had laid their first plans.
They lingered over dinner and then over wine as though hesitating to return again to the old
subject.
It was Jole Turbor, who, peering steadily into the purple depths of the wineglass with one eye,
muttered, rather than said, "Well, Homir, you are a man of affairs now, I see. You handled
matters well."
"I?" Munn laughed loudly and joyously. For some reason, he had not stuttered in months. "I
hadn't a thing to do with it. It was Arcadia. By the by, Darell, how is she? She's coming back
from Trantor, I heard?"
"You heard correctly," said Darell, quietly. "Her ship should dock within the week." He looked,
with veiled eyes, at the others, but there were only confused, amorphous exclamations of
pleasure. Nothing else.
Turbor said, "Then it's over, really. Who would have predicted all this ten months ago. Munn's
been to Kalgan and back. Arcadia's been to Kalgan and Trantor and is coming back. We've had
a war and won it, by Space. They tell you that the vast sweeps of history can be predicted, but
doesn't it seem conceivable that all that has just happened, with its absolute confusion to those
of us who lived through it, couldn't possibly have been predicted."
"Nonsense," said Anthor, acidly. "What makes you so triumphant, anyway? You talk as though
we have really won a war, when actually we have won nothing but a petty brawl which has
served only to distract our minds from the real enemy."
There was an uncomfortable silence, in which only Homir Munn's slight smile struck a
discordant note.
And Anthor struck the arm of his chair with a balled and furyfilled fist, "Yes, I refer to the
Second Foundation. There is no mention of it and, if I judge correctly, every effort to have no
thought of it. Is it because this fallacious atmosphere of victory that palls over this world of idiots
is so attractive that you feel you must participate? Turn somersaults then, handspring your way
into a wall, pound one another's back and throw confetti out the window. Do whatever you
please, only get it out of your system - and when you are quite done and you are yourselves
again, return and let us discuss that problem which exists now precisely as it did ten months
ago when you sat here with eyes cocked over your shoulders for fear of you knew not what. Do
you really think that the Mind-masters of the Second Foundation are less to be feared because
you have beat down a foolish wielder of spaceships."
Fie paused, red-faced and panting.
Munn said quietly, "Will you hear me speak now, Anthor? Or do you prefer to continue your role
as ranting conspirator?"
"Flave your say, Flomir," said Darell, "but let's all of us refrain from over-picturesqueness of
language. It's a very good thing in its place, but at present, it bores me."
Flomir Munn leaned back in his armchair and carefully refilled his glass from the decanter at his
elbow.
"I was sent to Kalgan," he said, "to find out what I could from the records contained in the
Mule's Palace. I spent several months doing so. I seek no credit for that accomplishment. As I
have indicated, it was Arcadia whose ingenuous intermeddling obtained the entry for me.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that to my original knowledge of the Mule's life and times, which,
I submit, was not small, I have added the fruits of much labor among primary evidence which
has been available to no one else.
"I am, therefore, in a unique position to estimate the true danger of the Second Foundation;
much more so than is our excitable friend here."
"And," grated Anthor, "what is your estimate of that danger?"
"Why, zero."
A short pause, and Elvett Semic asked with an air of surprised disbelief, "You mean zero
danger?"
"Certainly. Friends, there is no Second Foundation!"
Anthor's eyelids closed slowly and he sat there, face pale and expressionless.
Munn continued, attention-centering and loving it, "And what is more, there was never one."
"On what," asked Darell, "do you base this surprising conclusion?"
"I deny," said Munn, "that it is surprising. You all know the story of the Mule's search for the
Second Foundation. But what do you know of the intensity of that search - of the
single-mindedness of it. He had tremendous resources at his disposal and he spared none of it.
He was single-minded - and yet he failed. No Second Foundation was found."
"One could scarcely expect it to be found," pointed out Turbor, restlessly. "It had means of
protecting itself against inquiring minds."
"Even when the mind that is inquiring is the Mule's mutant mentality? I think not. But come, you
do not expect me to give you the gist of fifty volumes of reports in five minutes. All of it, by the
terms of the peace treaty will be part of the Seldon Historical Museum eventually, and you will
all be free to be as leisurely in your analysis as I have been. You will find his conclusion plainly
stated, however, and that I have already expressed. There is not, and has never been, any
Second Foundation."
Semic interposed, "Well, what stopped the Mule, then?"
"Great Galaxy, what do you suppose stopped him? Death did; as it will stop all of us. The
greatest superstition of the age is that the Mule was somehow stopped in an all-conquering
career by some mysterious entities superior even to himself. It is the result of looking at
everything in wrong focus.
"Certainly no one in the Galaxy can help knowing that the Mule was a freak, physical as well as
mental. He died in his thirties because his ill-adjusted body could no longer struggle its creaking
machinery along. For several years before his death he was an invalid. His best health was
never more than an ordinary man's feebleness. All right, then. He conquered the Galaxy and, in
the ordinary course of nature, proceeded to die. It's a wonder he proceeded as long and as well
as he did. Friends, it's down in the very clearest print. You have only to have patience. You
have only to try to look at all facts in new focus."
Darell said, thoughtfully, "Good, let us try that Munn. It would be an interesting attempt and, if
nothing else, would help oil our thoughts. These tampered men - the records of which Anthor
brought to us nearly a year ago, what of them? Help us to see them in focus."
"Easily. How old a science is encephalographic analysis? Or, put it another way, how
well-developed is the study of neuronic pathways."
"We are at the beginning in this respect. Granted," said Darell.
"Right. How certain can we be then as to the interpretation of what I've heard Anthor and
yourself call the Tamper Plateau. You have your theories, but how certain can you be. Certain
enough to consider it a firm basis for the existence of a mighty force for which all other
evidence is negative? It's always easy to explain the unknown by postulating a superhuman
and arbitrary will.
"It's a very human phenomenon. There have been cases all through Galactic history where
isolated planetary systems have reverted to savagery, and what have we learned there? In
every case, such savages attribute the to-them-incomprehensible forces of Nature - storms,
pestilences, droughts - to sentient beings more powerful and more arbitrary than men.
"It is called anthropomorphism, I believe, and in this respect, we are savages and indulge in it.
Knowing little of mental science, we blame anything we don't know on supermen - those of the
Second Foundation in this case, based on the hint thrown us by Seldon."
"Oh," broke in Anthor, "then you do remember Seldon. I thought you had forgotten. Seldon did
say there was a Second Foundation. Get that in focus.
"And are you aware then of all Seldon's purposes. Do you know what necessities were involved
in his calculations? The Second Foundation may have been a very necessary scarecrow, with
a highly specific end in view. Flow did we defeat Kalgan, for instance? What were you saying in
your last series of articles, Turbor?"
Turbor stirred his bulk. "Yes, I see what "You're driving at. I was on Kalgan towards the end,
Darell, and it was quite obvious that morale on the planet was incredibly bad. I looked through
their news-records and - well, they expected to be beaten. Actually, they were completely
unmanned by the thought that eventually the Second Foundation would take a hand, on the
side of the First, naturally."
"Quite right," said Munn. "I was there all through the war. I told Stettin there was no Second
Foundation and he believed me. He felt safe. But there was no way of making the people
suddenly disbelieve what they had believed all their lives, so that the myth eventually served a
very useful purpose in Seldon's cosmic chess game."
But Anthor's eyes opened, quite suddenly, and fixed themselves sardonically on Munn's
countenance. "I say you lie. "
Flomir turned pale, "I don't see that I have to accept, much less answer, an accusation of that
nature."
"I say it without any intention of personal offense. You cannot help lying; you don't realize that
you are. But you lie just the same."
Semic laid his withered hand on the young man's sleeve. "Take a breath, young fella."
Anthor shook him off, none too gently, and said, "I'm out of patience with all of you. I haven't
seen this man more than half a dozen times in my life, yet I find the change in him
unbelievable. The rest of you have known him for years, yet pass it by. It is enough to drive one
mad. Do you call this man you've been listening to Flomir Munn? Fie is not the Flomir Munn /
knew."
A medley of shock; above which Munn's voice cried, "You claim me to be an impostor?"
"Perhaps not in the ordinary sense," shouted Anthor above the din, "but an impostor
nonetheless. Quiet, everyone! I demand to be heard."
Fie frowned them ferociously into obedience. "Do any of you remember Flomir Munn as I do -
the introverted librarian who never talked without obvious embarrassment; the man of tense
and nervous voice, who stuttered out his uncertain sentences? Does this man sound like him?
Fle's fluent, he's confident, he's fun of theories, and, by Space, he doesn't stutter. Is he the
same person?"
Even Munn looked confused, and Pelleas Anthor drove on. "Well, shall we test him?
How?" asked Darell.
"You ask how? There is the obvious way. You have his encephalographic record of ten months
ago, haven't you? Run one again, and compare."
He pointed at the frowning librarian, and said violently, "I dare him to refuse to subject himself
to analysis."
"I don't object," said Munn, defiantly. "I am the man I always was."
"Can you know?" said Anthor with contempt. "I’ll go further. I trust no one here. I want everyone
to undergo analysis. There has been a war. Munn has been on Kalgan; Turbor has been on
board ship and all over the war areas. Darell and Semic have been absent, too - I have no idea
where. Only I have remained here in seclusion and safety, and I no longer trust any of the rest
of you. And to play fair, I’ll submit to testing as well. Are we agreed then? Or do I leave now and
go my own way?"
Turbor shrugged and said, "I have no objection."
"I have already said I don't," said Munn.
Semic moved a hand in silent assent, and Anthor waited for Darell. Finally, Darell nodded his
head.
"Take me first," said Anthor.
The needles traced their delicate way across the cross-hatchings as the young neurologist sat
frozen in the reclining seat, with lidded eyes brooding heavily. From the files, Darell removed
the folder containing Anthor's old encephalographic record. He showed them to Anthor.
"That's your own signature, isn't it?"
"Yes, yes. It's my record. Make the comparison."
The scanner threw old and new on to the screen. All six curves in each recording were there,
and in the darkness, Munn's voice sounded in harsh clarity. "Well, now, look there. There's a
change."
"Those are the primary waves of the frontal lobe. It doesn't mean a thing, Homir. Those
additional jags you're pointing to are just anger. It's the others that count."
He touched a control knob and the six pairs melted into one another and coincided. The deeper
amplitude of primaries alone introduced doubling.
"Satisfied?" asked Anthor.
Darell nodded curtly and took the seat himself. Semic followed him and Turbor followed him.
Silently the curves were collected; silently they were compared.
Munn was the last to take his seat. For a moment, he hesitated, then, with a touch of
desperation in his voice, he said, "Well now, look, I'm coming in last and I'm under tension. I
expect due allowance to be made for that."
"There will be," Darell assured him. "No conscious emotion of yours will affect more than the
primaries and they are not important."
It might have been hours, in the utter silence that followed
And then in the darkness of the comparison, Anthor said huskily: "Sure, sure, it's only the onset
of a complex. Isn't that what he told us? No such thing as tampering; it's all a silly
anthropomorphic notion - but look at it! A coincidence I suppose."
"What's the matter?" shrieked Munn.
Darell's hand was tight on the librarian's shoulder. "Quiet, Munn - you've been handled; you've
been adjusted by them."
Then the light went on, and Munn was looking about him with broken eyes, making a horrible
attempt to smile.
"You can't be serious, surely. There is a purpose to this. You're testing me."
But Darell only shook his head. "No, no, Homir. It's true."
The librarian's eyes were filled with tears, suddenly. "I don't feel any different. I can't believe it."
With sudden conviction: "You are all in this. It's a conspiracy."
Darell attempted a soothing gesture, and his hand was struck aside. Munn snarled, "You're
planning to kill me. By Space, you're planning to kill me."
With a lunge, Anthor was upon him. There was the sharp crack of bone against bone, and
Homir was limp and flaccid with that look of fear frozen on his face.
Anthor rose shakily, and said, "We'd better tie and gag him. Later, we can decide what to do."
He brushed his long hair back.
Turbor said, "How did you guess there was something wrong with him?"
Anthor turned sardonically upon him. "It wasn't difficult. You see, / happen to know where the
Second Foundation really is. "
Successive shocks have a decreasing effect-
It was with actual mildness that Semic asked, "Are you sure? I mean we’ve just gone through
this sort of business with Munn-"
This isn't quite the same," returned Anthor. "Darell, the day the war started, I spoke to you most
seriously. I tried to have you leave Terminus. I would have told you then what I will tell you now,
if I had been able to trust you."
"You mean you have known the answer for half a year?" smiled Darell.
"I have known it from the time I learned that Arcadia had left for Trantor."
And Darell started to his feet in sudden consternation. "What had Arcadia to do with it? What
are you implying?"
"Absolutely nothing that is not plain on the face of all the events we know so well. Arcadia goes
to Kalgan and flees in terror to the very center of the Galaxy, rather than return home.
Lieutenant Dirige, our best agent on Kalgan is tampered with. Homir Munn goes to Kalgan and
he is tampered with. The Mule conquered the Galaxy, but, queerly enough, he made Kalgan his
headquarters, and it occurs to me to wonder if he was conqueror or, perhaps, tool. At every
turn, we meet with Kalgan, Kalgan - nothing but Kalgan, the world that somehow survived
untouched all the struggles of the warlords for over a century."
"Your conclusion, then."
"Is obvious," Anthor's eyes were intense. "The Second Foundation is on Kalgan."
Turbor interrupted. "I was on Kalgan, Anthor. I was there last week. If there was any Second
Foundation on it, I'm mad. Personally, I think you're mad."
The young man whirled on him savagely. "Then you're a fat fool. What do you expect the
Second Foundation to be? A grammar school? Do you think that Radiant Fields in tight beams
spell out ‘Second Foundation' in green and purple along the incoming spaceship routes? Listen
to me, Turbor. Wherever they are, they form a tight oligarchy. They must be as well hidden on
the world on which they exist, as the world itself is in the Galaxy as a whole."
Turbor's jaw muscles writhed. "I don't like your attitude, Anthor."
"That certainly disturbs me," was the sarcastic response. "Take a look about you here on
Terminus. We’re at the center - the core - the origin of the First Foundation with all its
knowledge of physical science. Well, how many of the population are physical scientists? Can
you operate an Energy Transmitting Station? What do you know of the operation of a
hyperatomic motor? Eh? The number of real scientists on Terminus - even on Terminus - can
be numbered at less than one percent of the population.
"And what then of the Second Foundation where secrecy must be preserved. There will still be
less of the cognoscenti, and these will be hidden even from their own world."
"Say," said Semic, carefully. "We just licked Kalgan-"
"So we did. So we did," said Anthor, sardonically. "Oh, we celebrate that victory. The cities are
still illuminated; they are still shooting off fireworks; they are still shouting over the televisors.
But now, now, when the search is on once more for the Second Foundation, where is the last
place well look; where is the last place anyone will look? Right!" Kalgan!
"We haven't hurt them, you know; not really. We've destroyed some ships, killed a few
thousands, torn away their Empire, taken over some of their commercial and economic power -
but that all means nothing. I'll wager that not one member of the real ruling class of Kalgan is in
the least discomfited. On the contrary, they are now safe from curiosity. But not from my
curiosity. What do you say, Darell?"
Darell shrugged his shoulders. "Interesting. I’m trying to fit it in with a message I received from
Arcadia a few months since."
"Oh, a message?" asked Anthor. "And what was it?"
"Well, I'm not certain. Five short words. But its interesting."
"Look," broke in Semic, with a worried interest, "there's something / don't understand."
"What's that?"
Semic chose his words carefully, his old upper lip lifting with each word as if to let them out
singly and reluctantly. "Well, now, Homir Munn was saying just a while ago that Hari Seldon
was faking when he said that he had established a Second Foundation. Now you're saying that
it's not so; that Seldon wasn't faking, eh?"
"Right, he wasn't faking. Seldon said he had established a Second Foundation and so he had."
"All right, then, but he said something else, too. Fie said he established the two Foundations at
opposite ends of the Galaxy. Now, young man, was that a. fake - because Kalgan isn't at the
opposite end of the Galaxy."
Anthor seemed annoyed, "That's a minor point. That part may well have been a cover up to
protect them. But after all, think- What real use would it serve to have the Mind-masters at the
opposite end of the Galaxy? What is their function? To help preserve the Plan. Who are the
main card players of the Plan? We, the First Foundation. Where can they best observe us,
then, and serve their own ends? At the opposite end of the Galaxy? Ridiculous! They're within
fifty parsecs, actually, which is much more sensible."
"I like that argument," said Darell. "It makes sense. Look here, Munn's been conscious for some
time and I propose we loose him. Fie can't do any harm, really."
Anthor looked rebellious, but Flomir was nodding vigorously. Five seconds later he was rubbing
his wrists just as vigorously.
"Flow do you feel?" asked Darell.
"Rotten," said Munn, sulkily, "but never mind. There's something I want to ask this bright young
thing here. I've heard what he's had to say, and I’d just like permission to wonder what we do
next."
There was a queer and incongruous silence.
Munn smiled bitterly. "Well, suppose Kalgan is the Second Foundation. Who on Kalgan are
they? Flow are you going to find them? Flow are you going to tackle them if you find them, eh?"
"Ah," said Darell, "I can answer that, strangely enough. Shall I tell you what Semic and I have
been doing this past half-year? It may give you another reason, Anthor, why I was anxious to
remain on Terminus all this time."
"In the first place," he went on, "I've been working on encephalographic analysis with more
purpose than any of you may suspect. Detecting Second Foundation minds is a little more
subtle than simply finding a Tamper Plateau - and I did not actually succeed. But I came close
enough.
"Do you know, any of you, how emotional control works? It's been a popular subject with fiction
writers since the time of the Mule and much nonsense has been written, spoken, and recorded
about it. For the most part, it has been treated as something mysterious and occult. Of course,
it isn't. That the brain is the source of a myriad, tiny electromagnetic fields, everyone knows.
Every fleeting emotion varies those fields in more or less intricate fashion, and everyone should
know that, too.
"Now it is possible to conceive a mind which can sense these changing fields and even
resonate with them. That is, a special organ of the cerebrum can exist which can take on
whatever field-pattern it may detect. Exactly how it would do this, I have no idea, but that
doesn't matter, if I were blind, for instance, I could still learn the significance of photons and
energy quanta and it could be reasonable to me that the absorption of a photon of such energy
could create chemical changes in some organ of the body such that its presence would be
detectable. But, of course, I would not be able, thereby, to understand color.
"Do all of you follow?"
There was a firm nod from Anthor; a doubtful nod from the others.
"Such a hypothetical Mind Resonating Organ, by adjusting itself to the Fields emitted by other
minds could perform what is popularly known as 'reading emotion’ or even 'reading minds,’
which is actually something even more subtle. It is but an easy step from that to imagining a
similar organ which could actually force an adjustment on another mind. It could orient with its
stronger Field the weaker one of another mind - much as a strong magnet will orient the atomic
dipoles in a bar of steel and leave it magnetized thereafter.
"I solved the mathematics of Second Foundationism in the sense that I evolved a function that
would predict the necessary combination of neuronic paths that would allow for the formation of
an organ such as I have just described - but, unfortunately, the function is too complicated to
solve by any of the mathematical tools at present known. That is too bad, because it means
that I can never detect a Mind-worker by his encephalographic pattern alone.
"But I could do something else. I could, with Semic's help, construct what I shall describe as a
Mental Static device. It is not beyond the ability of modem science to create an energy source
that will duplicate an encephalograph-type pattern of electromagnetic field. Moreover, it can be
made to shift at complete random, creating, as far as this particular mind-sense is concerned, a
sort of 'noise' or 'static' which masks other minds with which it may be in contact.
"Do you still follow?"
Semic chuckled. Fie had helped create blindly, but he had guessed, and guessed correctly. The
old man had a trick or two left—
Anthor said, "I think I do."
"The device," continued Darell, "is a fairly easy one to produce, and I had all the resources of
the Foundation under my control as it came under the heading of war research. And now the
mayor's offices and the Legislative assemblies are surrounded with Mental Static. So are most
of our key factories. So is this building. Eventually, any place we wish can be made absolutely
safe from the Second Foundation or from any future Mule. And that's it."
He ended quite simply with a flat-palmed gesture of the hand.
Turbor seemed stunned. "Then it's all over. Great Seldon, it's all over."
"Well," said Darell, "not exactly."
"How, not exactly? Is there something more?"
"Yes, we haven't located the Second Foundation yet!"
"What," roared Anthor, "are you trying to say-"
"Yes, I am. Kalgan is not the Second Foundation."
"How do you know?"
"It's easy," grunted Darell. "You see / happen to know where the Second Foundation really is. "
21
The Answer That Satisfied
Turbor laughed suddenly - laughed in huge, windy gusts that bounced ringingly off the walls
and died in gasps. He shook his head, weakly, and said, "Great Galaxy, this goes on all night.
One after another, we put up our straw men to be knocked down. We have fun, but we don't get
anywhere. Space! Maybe all planets are the Second Foundation. Maybe they have no planet,
just key men spread on all the planets. And what does it matter, since Darell says we have the
perfect defense?"
Darell smiled without humor. "The perfect defense is not enough, Turbor. Even my Mental
Static device is only something that keeps us in the same place. We cannot remain forever with
our fists doubled, frantically staring in all directions for the unknown enemy. We must know not
only how to win, but whom to defeat. And there is a specific world on which the enemy exists."
"Get to the point," said Anthor, wearily. "What's your information?"
"Arcadia," said Darell, "sent me a message, and until I got it, I never saw the obvious. I
probably would never have seen the obvious. Yet it was a simple message that went: 'A circle
has no end.’ Do you see?"
"No," said Anthor, stubbornly, and he spoke, quite obviously, for the others.
"A circle has no end," repeated Munn, thoughtfully, and his forehead furrowed.
"Well," said Darell, impatiently, "it was clear to me- What is the one absolute fact we know
about the Second Foundation, eh? I'll tell you! We know that Hari Seldon located it at the
opposite end of the Galaxy. Homir Munn theorized that Seldon lied about the existence of the
Foundation. Pelleas Anthor theorized that Seldon had told the truth that far, but lied about the
location of the Foundation. But I tell you that Hari Seldon lied in no particular; that he told the
absolute truth.
"But, what is the other end? The Galaxy is a flat, lens-shaped object. A cross section along the
flatness of it is a circle, and a circle had no end - as Arcadia realized. We - we, the First
Foundation - are located on Terminus at the rim of that circle. We are at an end of the Galaxy,
by definition. Now follow the rim of that circle and find the other end. Follow it, follow it, follow it,
and you will find no other end. You will merely come back to your starting point-
"And there you will find the Second Foundation."
"There?" repeated Anthor. "Do you mean here?"
"Yes, I mean here!" cried Darell, energetically. "Why, where else could it possibly be? You said
yourself that if the Second Foundationers were the guardians of the Seldon Plan, it was unlikely
that they could be located at the so-called other end of the Galaxy, where they would be as
isolated as they could conceivably be. You thought that fifty parsecs distance was more
sensible. I tell you that that is also too far. That no distance at all is more sensible. And where
would they be safest? Who would look for them here? Oh, it's the old principle of the most
obvious place being the least suspicious.
"Why was poor Ebling Mis so surprised and unmanned by his discovery of the location of the
Second Foundation? There he was, looking for it desperately in order to warn it of the coming
of the Mule, only to find that the Mule had already captured both Foundations at a stroke. And
why did the Mule himself fail, in his search? Why not? If one is searching for an unconquerable
menace, one would scarcely look among the enemies already conquered. So the
Mind-masters, in their own leisurely time, could lay their plans to stop the Mule, and succeeded
in stopping him.
"Oh, it is maddeningly simple. For here we are with our plots and our schemes, thinking that we
are keeping our secrecy - when all the time we are in the very heart and core of our enemy's
stronghold. It's humorous."
Anthor did not remove the skepticism from his face, "You honestly believe this theory, Dr.
Darell?"
"I honestly believe it."
"Then any of our neighbors, any man we pass in the street might be a Second Foundation
superman, with his mind watching yours and feeling the pulse of its thoughts."
"Exactly."
"And we have been permitted to proceed all this time, without molestation?"
"Without molestation? Who told you we were not molested? You, yourself, showed that Munn
has been tampered with. What makes you think that we sent him to Kalgan in the first place
entirely of our own volition - or that Arcadia overheard us and followed him on her own volition?
Hah ! We have been molested without pause, probably. And after all, why should they do more
than they have? It is far more to their benefit to mislead us, than merely to stop us."
Anthor buried himself in meditation and emerged therefrom with a dissatisfied expression.
"Well, then, I don't like it. Your Mental Static isn't worth a thought. We can't stay in the house
forever and as soon as we leave, we're lost, with what we now think we know. Unless you can
build a little machine for every inhabitant in the Galaxy."
"Yes, but we're not quite helpless, Anthor. These men of the Second Foundation have a special
sense which we lack. It is their strength and also their weakness. For instance, is there any
weapon of attack that will be effective against a normal, sighted man which is useless against a
blind man?"
"Sure," said Munn, promptly. "A light in the eyes."
"Exactly," said Darell. "A good, strong blinding light."
"Well, what of it?" asked Turbor.
"But the analogy is clear. I have a Mind Static device. It sets up an artificial electromagnetic
pattern, which to the mind of a man of the Second Foundation would be like a beam of light to
us. But the Mind Static device is kaleidoscopic. It shifts quickly and continuously, faster than the
receiving mind can follow. All right then, consider it a flickering light; the kind that would give
you a headache, if continued long enough. Now intensify that light or that electromagnetic field
until it is blinding - and it will become a pain, an unendurable pain. But only to those with the
proper sense; not to the unsensed."
"Really?" said Anthor, with the beginnings of enthusiasm. "Flave you tried this?"
"On whom? Of course, I haven't tried it. But it will work."
"Well, where do you have the controls for the Field that surrounds the house? Id like to see this
thing."
"Flere." Darell reached into his jacket pocket. It was a small thing, scarcely bulging his pocket.
Fie tossed the black, knob-studded cylinder to the other.
Anthor inspected it carefully and shrugged his shoulders. "It doesn't make me any smarter to
look at it. Look Darell, what mustn't I touch? I don't want to turn off the house defense by
accident, you know."
"You won't," said Darell, indifferently. "That control is locked in place." Fie flicked at a toggle
switch that didn't move.
"And what's this knob?"
"That one varies rate of shift of pattern. Flere - this one varies the intensity. It's that which I've
been referring to."
"May I-" asked Anthor, with his finger on the intensity knob. The others were crowding close.
"Why not?" shrugged Darell. "It won't affect us."
Slowly, almost wincingly, Anthor turned the knob, first in one direction, then in another. Turbor
was gritting his teeth, while Munn blinked his eyes rapidly. It was as though they were keening
their inadequate sensory equipment to locate this impulse which could not affect them.
Finally, Anthor shrugged and tossed the control box back into Darell's lap. "Well, I suppose we
can take your word for it. But it's certainly hard to imagine that anything was happening when I
turned the knob."
"But naturally, Pelleas Anthor," said Darell, with a tight smile. "The one I gave you was a
dummy. You see I have another." He tossed his jacket aside and seized a duplicate of the
control box that Anthor had been investigating, which swung from his belt.
"You see," said Darell, and in one gesture turned the intensity knob to maximum.
And with an unearthly shriek, Pelleas Anthor sank to the floor. He rolled in his agony; whitened,
gripping fingers clutching and tearing futilely at his hair.
Munn lifted his feet hastily to prevent contact with the squirming body, and his eyes were twin
depths of horror. Semic and Turbor were a pair of plaster casts; stiff and white.
Darell, somber, turned the knob back once more. And Anthor twitched feebly once or twice and
lay still. He was alive, his breath racking his body.
"Lift him on to the couch," said Darell, grasping the young man's head. "Help me here."
Turbor reached for the feet. They might have been lifting a sack of flour. Then, after long
minutes, the breathing grew quieter, and Anthor's eyelids fluttered and lifted. His face was a
horrid yellow; his hair and body was soaked in perspiration, and his voice, when he spoke, was
cracked and unrecognizable.
"Don't," he muttered, "don't! Don't do that again! You don't know- You don't know- Oh-h-h." It
was a long, trembling moan.
"We won't do it again," said Darell, "if you will tell us the truth. You are a member of the Second
Foundation?"
"Let me have some water," pleaded Anthor.
"Get some, Turbor," said Darell, "and bring the whiskey bottle."
He repeated the question after pouring a jigger of whiskey and two glasses of water into
Anthor. Something seemed to relax in the young man-
"Yes," he said, wearily. "I am a member of the Second Foundation."
"Which," continued Darell, "is located on Terminus - here?"
"Yes, yes. You are right in every particular, Dr. Darell."
"Good! Now explain what's been happening this past half year. Tell us!"
"I would like to sleep," whispered Anthor.
"Later! Speak now!"
A tremulous sigh. Then words, low and hurried. The others bent over him to catch the sound,
"The situation was growing dangerous. We knew that Terminus and its physical scientists were
becoming interested in brain-wave patterns and that the times were ripe for the development of
something like the Mind Static device. And there was growing enmity toward the Second
Foundation. We had to stop it without ruining Seldon's Plan.
"We ... we tried to control the movement. We tried to join it. It would turn suspicion and efforts
away from us. We saw to it that Kalgan declared war as a further distraction. That's why I sent
Munn to Kalgan. Stettin's supposed mistress was one of us. She saw to it that Munn made the
proper moves-"
"Callia is-" cried Munn, but Darell waved him silent.
Anthor continued, unaware of any interruption, "Arcadia followed. We hadn't counted on that -
can't foresee everything - so Callia maneuvered her to Trantor to prevent interference. That's
all. Except that we lost."
"You tried to get me to go to Trantor, didn't you?" asked Darell.
Anthor nodded, "Had to get you out of the way. The growing triumph in your mind was clear
enough. You were solving the problems of the Mind Static device."
"Why didn't you put me under control?"
"Couldn't ... couldn't. Had my orders. We were working according to a Plan. If I improvised, I
would have thrown everything off. Plan only predicts probabilities ... you know that ... like
Seldon's Plan." He was talking in anguished pants, and almost incoherently. His head twisted
from side to side in a restless fever. "We worked with individuals ... not groups ... very low
probabilities involved ... lost out. Besides ... if control you ... someone else invent device ... no
use ... had to control times ... more subtle ... First Speaker's own plan ... don't know all angles
... except ... didn't work a-a-a-" He ran down.
Darell shook him roughly, "You can't sleep yet. How many of you are there?"
"Huh? Whatjasay ... oh ... not many ... be surprised fifty ... don't need more."
"All here on Terminus?"
"Five ... six out in Space ... like Callia ... got to sleep."
He stirred himself suddenly as though to one giant effort, and his expressions gained in clarity.
It was a last attempt at self-justification, at moderating his defeat.
"Almost got you at the end. Would have turned off defenses and seized you. Would have seen
who was master. But you gave me dummy controls ... suspected me all along-"
And finally he was asleep.
Turbor said, in awed tones, "How long did you suspect him, Darell?"
"Ever since he first came here," was the quiet response. "He came from Kleise, he said. But I
knew Kleise; and I knew on what terms we parted. He was a fanatic on the subject of the
Second Foundation and I had deserted him. My own purposes were reasonable, since I
thought it best and safest to pursue my own notions by myself. But I couldn't tell Kleise that;
and he wouldn't have listened if I had. To him, I was a coward and a traitor, perhaps even an
agent of the Second Foundation. He was an unforgiving man and from that time almost to the
day of his death he had no dealings with me. Then, suddenly, in his last few weeks of life, he
writes me - as an old friend - to greet his best and most promising pupil as a co-worker and
begin again the old investigation.
"It was out of character. How could he possibly do such a thing without being under outside
influence, and I began to wonder if the only purpose might not be to introduce into my
confidence a real agent of the Second Foundation. Well, it was so-"
He sighed and closed his own eyes for a moment.
Semic put in hesitantly, "What will we do with all of them ... these Second Foundation fellas?"
"I don't know," said Darell, sadly. "We could exile them, I suppose. There's Zoranel, for
instance. They can be placed there and the planet saturated with Mind Static. The sexes can
be separated, or, better still, they can be sterilized - and in fifty years, the Second Foundation
will be a thing of the past. Or perhaps a quiet death for all of them would be kinder."
"Do you suppose," said Turbor, "we could learn the use of this sense of theirs. Or are they born
with it, like the Mule."
"I don't know. I think it is developed through long training, since there are indications from
encephalography that the potentialities of it are latent in the human mind. But what do you want
that sense for? It hasn't helped them."
He frowned.
Though he said nothing, his thoughts were shouting.
It had been too easy - too easy. They had fallen, these invincibles, fallen like book-villains, and
he didn't like it.
Galaxy! When can a man know he is not a puppet? How can a man know he is not a puppet?
Arcadia was coming home, and his thoughts shuddered away from that which he must face in
the end.
She was home for a week, then two, and he could not loose the tight check upon those
thoughts. How could he? She had changed from child to young woman in her absence, by
some strange alchemy. She was his link to life; his fink to a bittersweet marriage that scarcely
outlasted his honeymoon.
And then, late one evening, he said as casually as he could, "Arcadia, what made you decide
that Terminus contained both Foundations?"
They had been to the theater; in the best seats with private trimensional viewers for each; her
dress was new for the occasion, and she was happy.
She stared at him for a moment, then tossed it off. "Oh, I Don't know, Father. It just came to
me."
A layer of ice thickened about Dr. Darell's heart.
"Think," he said, intensely. "This is important. What made you decide both Foundations were
on Terminus."
She frowned slightly. "Well, there was Lady Callia. I knew she was a Second Foundationer.
Anthor said so, too."
"But she was on Kalgan," insisted Darell. "What made you decide on Terminus?"
And now Arcadia waited for several minutes before she answered. What had made her decide?
What had made her decide?
She had the horrible sensation of something slipping just beyond her grasp.
She said, "She knew about things - Lady Callia did - and must have had her information from
Terminus. Doesn't that sound right, Father?
But he just shook his head at her.
"Father," she cried, "I knew. The more I thought, the surer I was. It just made sense."
There was that lost look in her father's eyes, "It's no good, Arcadia. Its no good. Intuition is
suspicious when concerned with the Second Foundation. You see that, don't you? It might have
been intuition - and it might have been control!"
"Control! You mean they changed me? Oh, no. No, they couldn't." She was backing away from
him. "But didn't Anthor say I was right? Fie admitted it. He admitted everything. And you've
found the whole bunch right here on Trantor. Didn't you? Didn't you?" She was breathing
quickly.
"I know, but- Arcadia, will you let me make an encephalographic analysis of your brain?'
She shook her head violently, "No, no! I'm too scared."
"Of me, Arcadia? There's nothing to be afraid of. But we must know. You see that, don't you?"
She interrupted him only once, after that. She clutched at his arm just before the last switch
was thrown. "What if I am different, Father? What will you have to do?"
"I won't have to do anything, Arcadia. If you're different, well leave. Well go back to Trantor, you
and I, and ... and we won't care about anything else in the Galaxy."
Never in Darell's life had an analysis proceeded so slowly, cost him so much, and when it was
over, Arcadia huddled down and dared not look. Then she heard him laugh and that was
information enough. She jumped up and threw herself into his opened arms.
He was babbling wildly as they squeezed one another, "The house is under maximum Mind
Static and your brain-waves are normal. We really have trapped them, Arcadia, and we can go
back to living."
"Father," she gasped, "can we let them give us medals now?"
"How did you know I’d asked to be left out of it?" He held her at arm's mind; you know
everything. All right, you can have your medal on a platform, with speeches."
"And Father?"
"Yes?"
"Can you call me Arkady from now on."
"But- Very well, Arkady."
Slowly the magnitude of the victory was soaking into him and saturating him. The Foundation -
the First Foundation - now the only Foundation - was absolute master of the Galaxy. No
further barrier stood between themselves and the Second Empire - the final fulfillment of
Seldon's Plan.
They had only to reach for it-
Thanks to-
22
The Answer That Was True
An unlocated room on an unlocated world!
And a man whose plan had worked.
The First Speaker looked up at the Student, "Fifty men and women," he said. "Fifty martyrs!
They knew it meant death or permanent imprisonment and they could not even be oriented to
prevent weakening - since orientation might have been detected. Yet they did not weaken.
They brought the plan through, because they loved the greater Plan."
"Might they have been fewer?" asked the Student, doubtfully.
The First Speaker slowly shook his head, "It was the lower limit. Less could not possibly have
carried conviction. In fact, pure objectivism would have demanded seventy-five to leave margin
for error. Never mind. Have you studied the course of action as worked out by the Speakers'
Council fifteen years ago?"
"Yes, Speaker."
"And compared it with actual developments?"
"Yes, Speaker." Then, after a pause-
"I was quite amazed, Speaker."
"I know. There is always amazement. If you knew how many men labored for how many
months - years, in fact - to bring about the polish of perfection, you would be less amazed.
Now tell me what happened - in words. I want your translation of the mathematics."
"Yes, Speaker." The young man marshaled his thoughts. "Essentially, it was necessary for the
men of the First Foundation to be thoroughly convinced that they had located and destroyed
the Second Foundation. In that way, there would be reversion to the intended original. To all
intents, Terminus would once again know nothing about us; include us in none of their
calculations. We are hidden once more, and safe - at the cost of fifty men."
"And the purpose of the Kalganian war?"
"To show the Foundation that they could beat a physical enemy - to wipe out the damage done
to their self-esteem and self-assuredness by the Mule."
"There you are insufficient in your analysis. Remember, the population of Terminus regarded us
with distinct ambivalence. They hated and envied our supposed superiority; yet they relied on
us implicitly for protection. If we had been 'destroyed' before the Kalganian war, it would have
meant panic throughout the Foundation. They would then never have had the courage to stand
up against Stettin, when he then attacked; and he would have. Only in the full flush of victory
could the 'destruction' have taken place with minimum ill-effects. Even waiting a year,
thereafter, might have meant a too-great cooling off spirit for success."
The Student nodded. "I see. Then the course of history will proceed without deviation in the
direction indicated by the Plan."
"Unless," pointed out the First Speaker, "further accidents, unforeseen and individual, occur."
"And for that," said the Student, "we still exist. Except- Except- One facet of the present state
of affairs worries me, Speaker. The First Foundation is left with the Mind Static device - a
powerful weapon against us. That, at least, is not as it was before."
"A good point. But they have no one to use it against. It has become a sterile device; just as
without the spur of our own menace against them, encephalographic analysis will become a
sterile science. Other varieties of knowledge will once again bring more important and
immediate returns. So this first generation of mental scientists among the First Foundation will
also be the last - and, in a century, Mind Static will be a nearly forgotten item of the past."
"Well-" The Student was calculating mentally. "I suppose you're right."
But what I want you most to realize, young man, for the sake of your future in the Council is the
consideration given to the tiny intermeshings that were forced into our plan of the last decade
and a half simply because we dealt with individuals. There was the manner in which Anthor had
to create suspicion against himself in such a way that it would mature at the right time, but that
was relatively simple.
"There was the manner in which the atmosphere was so manipulated that to no one on
Terminus would it occur, prematurely, that Terminus itself might be the center they were
seeking. That knowledge had to be supplied to the young girl, Arcadia, who would be heeded
by no one but her own father. She had to be sent to Trantor, thereafter, to make certain that
there would be no premature contact with her father. Those two were the two poles of a
hyperatomic motor; each being inactive without the other. And the switch had to be thrown -
contact had to be made - at just the right moment. I saw to that!
"And the final battle had to be handled properly. The Foundation's fleet had to be soaked in
self-confidence, while the fleet of Kalgan made ready to run. I saw to that, also!"
Said the Student, "It seems to me, Speaker, that you ... I mean, all of us ... were counting on
Dr. Darell not suspecting that Arcadia was our tool. According to my check on the calculations,
there was something like a thirty percent probability that he would so suspect. What would have
happened then?"
"We had taken care of that. What have you been taught about Tamper Plateaus? What are
they? Certainly not evidence of the introduction of an emotional bias. That can be done without
any chance of possible detection by the most refined conceivable encephalographic analysis. A
consequence of Leffert's Theorem, you know. It is the removal, the cutting-out, of previous
emotional bias, that shows. It must show.
"And, of course, Anthor made certain that Darell knew all about Tamper Plateaus.
"However- When can an individual be placed under Control without showing it? Where there is
no previous emotional bias to remove. In other words, when the individual is a new-born infant
with a blank slate of a mind. Arcadia Darell was such an infant here on Trantor fifteen years
ago, when the first line was drawn into the structure of the plan. She will never know that she
has been Controlled, and will be all the better for it, since her Control involved the development
of a precocious and intelligent personality."
The First Speaker laughed shortly, "In a sense, it is the irony of it all that is most amazing. For
four hundred years, so many men have been blinded by Seldon's words 'the other end of the
Galaxy.' They have brought their own peculiar, physical-science thought to the problem,
measuring off the other end with protractors and rulers, ending up eventually either at a point in
the periphery one hundred eighty degrees around the rim of the Galaxy, or back at the original
point.
"Yet our very greatest danger lay in the fact that there was a possible solution based on
physical modes of thought. The Galaxy, you know, is not simply a flat ovoid of any sort; nor is
the periphery a closed curve. Actually, it is a double spiral, with at least eighty percent of the
inhabited planets on the Main Arm. Terminus is the extreme outer end of the spiral arm, and we
are at the other - since, what is the opposite end of a spiral? Why, the center.
"But that is trifling. It is an accidental and irrelevant solution. The solution could have been
reached immediately, if the questioners had but remembered that Hari Seldon was a social
scientist not a physical scientist and adjusted their thought processes accordingly. What could
'opposite ends’ mean to a social scientist? Opposite ends on the map? Of course not. That's
the mechanical interpretation only.
"The First Foundation was at the periphery, where the original Empire was weakest, where its
civilizing influence was least, where its wealth and culture were most nearly absent. And where
is the social opposite end of the Galaxy? Why, at the place where the original Empire was
strongest, where its civilizing influence was most, where its wealth and culture were most
strongly present.
"Here! At the center! At Trantor, capital of the Empire of Seldon's time.
"And it is so inevitable. Hari Seldon left the Second Foundation behind him to maintain,
improve, and extend his work That has been known, or guessed at, for fifty years. But where
could that best be done? At Trantor, where Seldon's group had worked, and where the data of
decades had been accumulated. And it was the purpose of the Second Foundation to protect
the Plan against enemies. That, too, was known! And where was the source of greatest danger
to Terminus and the Plan?
"Here! Here at Trantor, where the Empire dying though it was, could, for three centuries, still
destroy the Foundation, if it could only have decided to do so.
"Then when Trantor fell and was sacked and utterly destroyed, a short century ago, we were
naturally able to protect our headquarters, and, on all the planet, the Imperial Library and the
grounds about it remained untouched. This was well-known to the Galaxy, but even that
apparently overwhelming hint passed them by.
"It was here at Trantor that Ebling Mis discovered us; and here that we saw to it that he did not
survive the discovery. To do so, it was necessary to arrange to have a normal Foundation girl
defeat the tremendous mutant powers of the Mule. Surely, such a phenomenon might have
attracted suspicion to the planet on which it happened- It was here that we first studied the
Mule and planned his ultimate defeat. It was here that Arcadia was born and the train of events
begun that led to the great return to the Seldon Plan.
"And all those flaws in our secrecy; those gaping holes; remained unnoticed because Seldon
had spoken of 'the other end’ in his way, and they had interpreted it in their way."
The First Speaker had long since stopped speaking to the Student. It was an exposition to
himself, really, as he stood before the window, looking up at the incredible blaze of the
firmament, at the huge Galaxy that was now safe forever.
"Hari Seldon called Trantor, 'Star's End,’" he whispered, "and why not that bit of poetic imagery.
All the universe was once guided from this rock; all the apron strings of the stars led here. 'All
roads lead to Trantor,' says the old proverb, 'and that is where all stars end.'"
Ten months earlier, the First Speaker had viewed those same crowding stars - nowhere as
crowded as at the center of that huge cluster of matter Man calls the Galaxy - with misgivings;
but now there was a somber satisfaction on the round and ruddy face of Preem Palver - First
Speaker.